Search

We examine the relationship between unemployment benefits and unemployment using Swedish regional data. To estimate the effect of an increase in unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment we exploit the ceiling on UI benefits. The benefit ceiling, coupled with the fact that there are regional wage differentials, implies that the generosity of UI varies regionally. More importantly, the actual generosity of UI varies within region over time due to variations in the benefit ceiling. We find fairly robust evidence suggesting that the actual generosity of UI does matter for regional unemployment. Increases in the actual replacement rate contribute to higher unemployment as suggested by theory. We also show that removing the wage cap in UI benefit receipt would reduce the dispersion of regional unemployment. This result is due to the fact that low unemployment regions tend to be high wage regions where the benefit ceiling has a greater bite. Removing the benefit ceiling thus implies that the actual generosity of UI increases more in low unemployment regions.

In this paper, we investigate the causes and consequences of “unclaimed” unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. A search model is developed where the costs to collecting UI benefits include both a traditional “fixed” administrative cost and an endogenous cost arising from worker and firm interactions. Experience rated taxes give firms an incentive to challenge a worker's UI claim, and these challenges are costly for the worker. Exploiting data on improper denials of UI benefits across states in the U.S. system, a two‐way fixed effects analysis shows a statistically significant negative relationship between the improper denials and the UI take‐up rate, providing empirical support for our model. We calibrate the model to elasticities implied by the two‐way fixed effects regression to quantify the relative size of these UI collection costs. The results imply that on average the costs associated with firm challenges of UI claims account for 41% of the total costs of collecting, with improper denials accounting for 8% of the total cost. The endogenous collection costs imply the unemployment rate responds much slower to changes in UI benefits relative to a model with fixed collection costs. Finally, removing all eligibility requirements and allowing workers to collect UI benefits without cost shows these costs to be 4.5% of expected output net of vacancy costs. Moreover, this change has minimal impact on the unemployment rate. Unemployment insurance take‐up rate experience rating matching frictions search E61 J32 J64 J65

Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. Typically, a caseworker reviews the unemployed worker's employment contacts at some frequency, and applies sanctions if certain requirements are not met. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment insurance framework of Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997), where job-search effort is private information for the unemployed worker. In the model, monitoring provides costly information upon which the government conditions the unemployment benefits. In the optimal monitoring scheme, endogenous sanctions and rewards, together with random monitoring, create effective job-search incentives for the unemployed worker. I calibrate the model to the US economy and find that the addition of optimal monitoring to the optimal unemployment insurance scheme decreases the variance of consumption by about two thirds and eliminates roughly half of the government's cost. I also find that compared with the optimal monitoring scheme, US states monitor too much and impose the sanctions over too short a time span. For the US on average, shifting to the optimal monitoring policy would generate savings of about $500 per unemployment spell.

To understand which firms take-up short-time work and which workers they enroll in this program, we provide a model which shows that short-time work may save jobs in firms hit by strong negative revenue shocks, but not in less severely-hit firms, where hours worked are reduced, without saving jobs. Using detailed data on the administration of the program covering the universe of French establishments in the 2008-2009 Great Recession, we find that short-time work did indeed save jobs and increase hours of work in firms faced with large negative shocks. These firms have been able to recover rapidly in the aftermath of the Recession thanks to short-time work. We also provide evidence of large windfall effects which significantly increased the cost of the policy per job saved; yet we also find that short-time work remains more cost-efficient at saving jobs than wage subsidies.

A tractable incomplete-market model with unemployment, sticky prices, and a fiscal side is used to quantify the macroeconomic effects of lockdown policies and the miti-gating effects of raising government spending and implementing UI benefit extensions. We find that the effects of lockdown policies, although we are relatively conservative about the size of the lockdown, are huge: unemployment doubles on impact and al-most triples even for relatively short lockdown durations. Output falls dramatically and debt-output ratios increase by several tens of percentage points. In addition, the surge in unemployment risk triggers a rise in precautionary savings that make such shocks Keynesian supply shocks: aggregate demand falls by more than aggregate supply, and lockdown policies are deflationary. Unfortunately, we find that raising public spending and extending UI benefits stimulate aggregate demand or improve risk-sharing but has little effects on output and unemployment, although they do alleviate the welfare losses of lockdown policies for the households.

A tractable incomplete-market model with endogenous unemployment risk, sticky prices, real wage rigidity and a fiscal side is calibrated to Euro Area countries and used to analyze the macroeconomic effects of lockdown policies. Modeling them as a shock to the extensive margin of labor adjustment – a rise in separations – produces large and persistent negative effects on output, unemployment and welfare, raises precautionary savings and lowers inflation, in line with early evidence about inflation dynamics. Modeling lockdowns as a shock to the intensive margin – a fall in labor utilization – produces small and short-lived macroeconomic and welfare effects, and implies a counterfactual rise in inflation. Conditional on a lockdown (separation) shock, raising public spending or extending UI benefits by large amounts is much more effective in stimulating the economy than during normal times. Quantitatively however, the ability of such policies to flatten the output and unemployment curves remains limited, even though these policies can alleviate a reasonable share of the aggregate welfare losses from the lockdown., Highlights • We propose a model with uninsured unemployment risk to analyze lockdown shocks and policy responses. • Lockdowns have very different implications whether they affect the intensive or the extensive margin of labor. • When affecting the extensive margin, lockdowns are Keynesian supply shocks. • Government policies stimulate the economy more during lockdowns than during normal times.

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more responsive to benefit levels during the recession and its aftermath, with an elasticity between 0.65 and 0.9 as compared to about 0.35 pre-recession.

This paper studies the effect of firm closures for prime-age and older workers. Administrative data on the Dutch labour force are used to follow a sample of Dutch workers who lost their jobs due to firm closures in the period 2000 - 2009. Applying difference-in-difference techniques and using a control group created by exact matching, we find that involuntary job loss has a severe impact on older workers' labour market prospects. Finding a new job is relatively difficult, and wage cuts are more substantial once they find a new job. The differences between prime-age and older workers are partly mediated by tenure and industry effects. Not only do older workers on average have longer job tenures than prime-age workers, older workers with longer job tenures experience more negative effects of displacement as well. For prime-age workers tenure in the job before displacement makes less of a difference for their outcomes after displacement. Likewise, displaced older workers are more sensitive to the situation in the local labour market in the industry from which they are displaced. Moreover, older workers experience stronger negative effects of changing industries after displacement on their post-displacement wages.

The goal of this paper is to detect the degree to which court decisions control the stringency of employment protection and investigate how such judicial discretion affects labor market performance. However, Identification difficulty arises because court decisions are volatile against economic and social conditions. This paper overcomes the endogeneity problem by exploiting the triennial judge transfer system in Japan, or the exogenous allocation of judges to prefectures. Specifically, I estimated the judge-specific effects from litigation records and instrumented them to the judgment indicator in the original model. A key finding in this paper is that prefecture employment rate is reduced by approximately 1.5% if a prefecture receives more pro-worker judgments than pro-employer ones in a given year. Interestingly, the result is robust to the instrumental variable estimates only if the sample includes observations of the Tokyo and Osaka Prefectures. Thus, judges assigned to these prefectures have played leading roles in exogenously establishing the doctrine of abusive adjustment dismissals, whereas the rest of the variation in judgments is reversely explained by local labor market performance.

We investigate the determinants of employment and wage insurance that firms offer to their employees against industry-level and idiosyncratic shocks. Using data on firms from 41 countries, we find that family firms provide more employment protection but less wage stability than non-family ones. Employment protection is priced: family firms pay a 5% lower average wage, controlling for country, industry and time effects. The additional protection offered by family firms is stronger, and the wage discount larger, the less generous the unemployment insurance system, indicating that firm-provided and government-provided employment insurance are substitutes. State-owned firms provide more employment stability than privately owned ones, and the same applies to business groups relative to standalone companies. The cross-country evidence is broadly confirmed by Italian employee-employer matched data, which additionally show that family firms adjust to shocks mostly through the hiring margin, while separations are not responsive to shocks. The matched data also reveal that the real wage discount featured by family firms tend to disappear if one controls for workers unobserved characteristics though workers fixed effects, suggesting that the wage discount observed in family firms is at least in part due to lower unobserved workers’ skills in family firms.

We study the effects of employment protection taking into account that firms can – as a second best response – invest in R&D or buy new technologies in order to restore their productivity. To do so we develop an equilibrium matching model with an imperfect labor and innovation market. If employment protection is introduced, firms’ willingness to pay for product or process innovations increases. This shifts economic activity towards firms specializing in process and product innovation and triggers entry of new start-ups. We calibrate our model to match aggregate US labor and product market statistics and show that our model generates the negative impact of wrongful dismissal laws in the US on productivity and the positive effect on the number of innovations and firms found by the literature.

This paper shows that the reforms which expanded short-time work in France after the great 2008-2009 recession were largely to the benefit of large firms which are recurrent short-time work users. We argue that this expansion of short-time work is an inefficient way to provide insurance to workers, as it entails cross-subsidies which reduce aggregate production. An efficient policy should provide unemployment insurance benefits funded by experience rated employers’ contributions instead of short-time work benefits. We find that short-time work entails significant production losses compared to an unemployment insurance scheme with experience rating.

ABOUT THE AUTHORNathalie HavetOFCE, Sciences Po, ParisEmail Address: nathalie.havet@univ-lyon1.frXavier Joutard Aix-Marseille Université, LEST–UMR7317 CNRS, OFCEEmail Address: xavier.joutard@univ-amu.frAlexis PenotUniversité de Lyon, ENS Lyon, GATE–UMR5824 CNRSEmail Address: penot@gate.cnrs.frRESUMELe dispositif des activités réduites vise à atténuer les effets désincitatifs du système d’allocation chômage en permettant aux demandeurs d’emploi de combiner activité rémunérée et recherche d’emploi tout en cumulant, au moins partiellement, la rémunération de son activité et ses allocations chômage. Notre revue de la littérature théorique et empirique cherche à savoir si ce dispositif, avec des incitations nécessairement limitées à l’exercice d’une activité temporaire ou à temps partiel, peut favoriser une insertion durable sur le marché du travail. Elle montre que les effets théoriques attendus sur les trajectoires professionnelles des demandeurs d’emploi et sur la qualité des emplois potentiellement retrouvés sont ambigus et méritent d’être tranchés empiriquement. Les études empiriques nationales et internationales mettent alors en évidence qu’il est nécessaire de distinguer les effets à court terme des effets à long terme et qu’il existe une forte hétérogénéité des impacts entre demandeurs d’emploi. Néanmoins, en France, l'activité réduite semble globalement un accélérateur de l'accès à l'emploi durable mais avec des effets relativement modestes. En outre, elle ne semble pas améliorer ni dégrader la qualité de l'emploi retrouvé.ABSTRACTThe use of reduced activities in France and its impact on professional trajectories: a review of the literature:The reduced-activity system aims to diminish the disincentive effects of unemployment benefits by allowing unemployed people to combine paid activity and job seeking, and at the same time to gain at least partialunemployment benefits as well as the wage for this activity. Our review of the theoretical and empirical literature aims to determine whether this system (which only concerns temporary or part-time jobs) allows a sustainable inclusion in the job market. It shows that the expected theoretical effects on the career trajectories of the unemployed and on the quality of new jobs are ambiguous and require empirical investigations. The national and international empirical papers show the need of distinguishing short-and long-term effects and a strong heterogeneity of impacts among job seekers. Nevertheless, in France, reduced activities seem to boost access to long-term jobs, but with mild effects. However, they seem neither to improve nor to damage the quality of the subsequent job, Le dispositif des activités réduites vise à atténuer les effets désincitatifs du système d’allocation chômage en permettant aux demandeurs d’emploi de combiner activité rémunérée et recherche d’emploi tout en cumulant, au moins partiellement, la rémunération de son activité et ses allocations chômage. Notre revue de la littérature théorique et empirique cherche à savoir si ce dispositif, avec des incitations nécessairement limitées à l’exercice d’une activité temporaire ou à temps partiel, peut favoriser une insertion durable sur le marché du travail. Elle montre que les effets théoriques attendus sur les trajectoires professionnelles des demandeurs d’emploi et sur la qualité des emplois potentiellement retrouvés sont ambigus et méritent d’être tranchés empiriquement. Les études empiriques nationales et internationales mettent alors en évidence qu’il est nécessaire de distinguer les effets à court terme des effets à long terme et qu’il existe une forte hétérogénéité des impacts entre demandeurs d’emploi. Néanmoins, en France, l'activité réduite semble globalement un accélérateur de l'accès à l'emploi durable mais avec des effets relativement modestes. En outre, elle ne semble pas améliorer ni dégrader la qualité de l'emploi retrouvé.

First published online: 14 March 2016 We investigate the development of household labor income, financial wealth, and asset holdings over a 9-year period around job loss, using unique administrative panel data from Norway. Consistent with predictions from theory, the data show additional saving and a shift toward safer assets in the years leading up to unemployment, and depletion of savings after job loss. In the years after job loss, the households' after-tax labor income is reduced by about USD 12,500. Over the same time period, households deplete USD 3,000 of their financial assets, of which one third is accumulated prior to the job loss. This suggests that at least some households can foresee and prepare for the upcoming unemployment, which indicates that private savings can, to some extent, serve as a substitute for publicly provided unemployment insurance. Article is the published version of a chapter (2) of the author's EUI PhD thesis, 2011

We study how optimal unemployment insurance (UI) benefits vary over the business cycle by estimating how the moral hazard cost and the consumption smoothing benefit of UI vary with the unemployment rate. We find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the unemployment rate is relatively low. By contrast, our evidence suggests that the consumption smoothing benefit of UI is acyclical. Using these estimates to calibrate our job search model, we find that a one standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate leads to a roughly 14 to 27 percentage point increase in the optimal wage replacement rate. We also conduct a model-based estimation of the structural parameters of the model, and we find that virtually all of the cyclical variation in the moral hazard cost and consumption smoothing benefit of UI is due to variation in the responsiveness of search effort as opposed to reservation wages.

Disability insurance (DI) applications and awards are countercyclical. One potential explanation is that unemployed individuals who exhaust their Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits use DI as a form of extended benefits. We exploit the haphazard pattern of UI benefit extensions in the Great Recession to identify the effect of UI exhaustion on DI application, using both aggregate data at the state-month and state-week levels and microdata on unemployed individuals in the Current Population Survey. We find no indication that expiration of UI benefits causes DI applications. Our estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects of meaningful magnitude.

We study the optimal provision of unemployment insurance (UI) in a framework that distinguishes between consumption and expenditure. We derive a “sufficient statistics” formula for optimal UI that is expressed in terms of observable variables and can therefore be used in applied work. Recent research has shown that unemployed households pay less per unit of consumption than employed households. This finding has two counteracting effects on the optimal level of UI. On the one hand, consumption smoothing benefits identified from expenditure data overestimate the true marginal benefits of UI. On the other hand, UI benefits become more valuable because they buy more consumption when unemployed. In an optimal design, which effect dominates depends on the curvature of the utility function. We show that for relative risk aversion larger than one the first effect dominates, leading to lower levels of optimal UI.

We examine the economic and social determinants of suicide mortality in a panel of 25 OECD countries over the period 1970 – 2011 and explicitly analyze the effects of unemployment and labor market institutions on suicide rates. In line with a large body of literature, our results suggest that unemployment and social factors are important determinants of suicide mortality. The results also indicate that unemployment benefits decrease suicides of males, while relatively strict employment protection regulations increase suicide mortality. These findings indicate that labor market institutions may influence job satisfaction and the quality of life in industrial countries. We suggest taking into account the role of labor market institutions when analyzing the effects of institutional and economic determinants on health.

In response to the Great Recession and sustained labor market downturn, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to new historical highs in the United States, up to 99 weeks as of late 2009 into 2012. We exploit variation in the timing and size of UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall impact of these extensions on unemployment duration, comparing the experience with the prior extension of benefits (up to 72 weeks) during the much milder downturn in the early 2000s. Using monthly matched individual data from the U.S. Current Population Survey (CPS) for the periods 2000-2005 and 2007-2012, we estimate the effects of UI extensions on unemployment transitions and duration. We rely on individual variation in benefit availability based on the duration of unemployment spells and the length of UI benefits available in the state and month, conditional on state economic conditions and individual characteristics. We find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment arising from both sets of UI extensions. The effect on exits and duration is primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than a decrease in exits to employment (the job finding rate). The magnitude of the overall effect on exits and duration is similar across the two episodes of benefit extensions. Although the overall effect of UI extensions on exits from unemployment is small, it implies a substantial effect of extended benefits on the steady-state share of unemployment in the cross-section that is long-term.

This paper examines how unemployment late in workers' careers affects the timing of their retirement. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation from 1996 to 2011, we document that unemployed workers permanently leave the labor force at a significantly higher rate than employed workers. This effect is stronger once workers become eligible for social security benefits and it is significantly dampened by the eligibility for unemployment insurance benefits. Unemployed workers, particularly those workers in households with below median wealth, also have a significantly higher social security uptake rate shortly after turning 62 than employed workers. We find little evidence for housing or stock market effects on the timing of retirement.

Martin Stuart ("Marty") Feldstein, currently George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. (NBER), is an American economist who has made important contributions to public finance, macroeconomics, international economics, social insurance, health economics, the economics of national security, and many other fields of economics, trained a large number of prominent economists, served as President of the National Bureau of Economic Research for some thirty years, and served as President Ronald Reagan's chief economic advisor.

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were to be increased for young workers and decreased for old. This is because young workers have little means to smooth consumption during unemployment, and want jobs to accumulate high-return human capital. So unemployment insurance is highly valuable to them while the induced moral hazard problem is mild. We consider a life cycle model with unemployment risk and endogenous search eort, that we calibrate to match US labor market institutions. We nd that allowing unemployment replacement rates and other government transfers to decline with age yields sizeable welfare gains which amount to around two thirds of the gains attained under the constrained optimal scheme for unemployment insurance over the life cycle.

Este artículo presenta cómo funciona un sistema de prestaciones por desempleo de “experience rating” en el que se recurre a un impuesto sobre los despidos para financiar dichas prestaciones y el tipo de cotización de cada empresa depende de su historial reciente de despidos. Se analizan algunas de sus ventajas e inconvenientes, enmarcándolo en el tema más general del reparto de los costes asociados a la rotación en el mercado de trabajo. También se examinan más en detalle dos problemas asociados al “experience rating” parcial o incompleto: el exceso de despidos temporales y la existencia de subsidios cruzados entre regiones, sectores y empresas. a partir de los datos de la Muestra Continua de Vidas laborales (MCVL), se cuantifican ambos problemas para el caso español. Los resultados pueden ofrecer indicios de los beneficios que se podrían obtener si el sistema incluyese elementos de “experience rating” en su diseño y financiación.

The trend towards labor market flexibility in Europe has typically involved introducing legislation that makes it easier for firms to issue temporary contracts with low firing costs, while not changing the level of protection that is in place for permanent jobs. This has created a strong “dualism” in some European labor markets, which might affect turnover, wage setting, and human capital accumulation. In view of this, some economists propose replacing the existing system of temporary and permanent contracts by a single open-ended contract for new hires, with severance pay smoothly increasing with tenure on the job.

The authors use a simple model to study the optimal design of unemployment insurance and employment protection. Workers are risk averse and face the possibility of unemployment. Firms are risk neutral and face random shocks to productivity. Workers can participate in a shadow economy, or informal sector. The model yields several lessons. First, countries should encourage formal employment to address the issue of informal employment. In extreme cases, such encouragement translates into high severance payments and negative payroll taxes. Along these same lines, unemployment payments cannot be too large. In fact, when the risk of informality is extreme, the authors find that unemployment benefits should be negative, which is (in effect) a positive tax on the lack of formal employment.

Les contrats courts sont utiles au bon fonctionnement de l’économie, mais en France leur développement combiné à leur raccourcissement induit d’importants coûts économiques et sociaux, qui pèsent lourdement sur l’ensemble des agents économiques, mais relativement peu sur la minorité d’entreprises qui en font un usage intensif. L’expérience montre qu’une réglementation plus stricte influe peu sur l’incitation à utiliser les contrats courts ; c’est plutôt sur l’équation économique des entreprises utilisatrices qu’il faut chercher à peser. La théorie économique incline d’ailleurs à moduler le prix des différents contrats de travail en fonction des externalités qu’ils engendrent. L’État pourrait taxer les contrats courts, mais l’assurance chômage y a un intérêt encore plus fort et immédiat. En effet, l’assurance chômage est en première ligne face à ces transformations de l’usage des contrats de travail, et ses règles ont beaucoup évolué pour s’y adapter. Mais elle est confrontée à un paradoxe : bien assurer les contrats courts crée des subventions croisées qui incitent à leur développement. Une modulation du prix des contrats de travail peut s’appuyer sur différents moyens. Mais tous ne se valent pas : l’objectif doit être clair, et l’instrument approprié pour y parvenir. Et tous ne sont pas adaptés aux problèmes français, qui appellent une règle lisible, légère à administrer, applicable à tous les contrats de travail et tous les secteurs (sans exception y compris public), incitant les employeurs à faire des choix économes des deniers de l’assurance ; la tarification doit être contemporaine de ces comportements, mais ni punitive ni symbolique, n’augmentant pas le coût du travail, et ne visant pas à renflouer l’Unedic. Nous décrivons les différents instruments de modulation du prix des contrats de travail. Étant bien entendu que l’absence de taxe est toujours préférable à une mauvaise taxe, la cotisation dégressive en fonction de la durée du contrat de travail, assortie d’un forfait et d’une franchise, apparaît la plus adaptée pour assurer la survie de l’assurance chômage dans un marché du travail marqué par l’usage croissant de contrats de travail toujours plus courts. Nos simulations illustrent que des paramètres finement négociés peuvent conduire à un équilibre raisonnable..

The interaction of incomplete markets and sticky nominal wages is shown to magnify business cycles even though these two features—in isolation—dampen them. During recessions, fears of unemployment stir up precautionary sentiments that induce agents to save more. The additional savings may be used as investments in both a productive asset (equity) and an unproductive nominal liquid asset. The desire to hold the nominal liquid asset puts deflationary pressure on the economy which, provided that nominal wages are sticky, increases labor costs, and reduces firm profits. Lower profits repress the desire to save in equity, which increases (the fear of) unemployment, and so on. This mechanism causes the model to behave differently from its complete markets version and is quantitatively important even if monetary policy counteracts the desire to hold more of the liquid asset by lowering the interest rate. The deflationary pressure yields a mean-reverting reduction in the price level, which implies an increase in expected inflation and a decrease in the expected real interest rate even if the policy rate does not adjust. Thus, our mechanism is different from the typical zero lower bound argument. Due to the deflationary spiral, our model also behaves differently from its incomplete market version without aggregate uncertainty, especially in terms of the impact of unemployment insurance on average employment levels.

La dégressivité des allocations chômage est une réforme structurelle populaire et prisée par les organisations internationales dans leurs programmes d’ajustement structurel. Il s’agit de stimuler la reprise d’emploi en réduisant l’aléa moral des chômeurs indemnisés afin de diminuer les dépenses d'assurance chômage. Nous effectuons une revue de la littérature consacrée d’une part au profil optimal des allocations chômage et d’autre part aux formes d’aléa moral que des allocations chômage dégressives visent à éliminer. Ces travaux montrent que les indicateurs observés pour diagnostiquer la présence d’aléa moral lié à des allocations chômage constantes amplifient cet effet et sont imprécis sur son origine. Par ailleurs, les effets positifs prêtés à la dégressivité des allocations chômage ne sont pas attestés par la littérature, même sous des hypothèses très restrictives; ce profil n’est que rarement optimal car il doit être associé à une générosité élevée et qu’il induit des effets indésirables. Les travaux empiriques montrent que la dégressivité ralentirait les sorties du chômage, et que cette taxe sur le chômage de longue durée a au mieux de faibles effets agrégés sur les dépenses de l’assurance chômage. Ainsi la littérature conclut majoritairement à l'optimalité de droits constants, ou même progressifs. Pour limiter l’apparition d’aléa moral tout en renforçant l’optimalité des règles, des instruments bien plus précis peuvent être utilisés: un contrôle ciblé des chômeurs susceptibles d’aléa moral, l’adaptation automatique de la durée des droits potentiels à la conjoncture de l’emploi, ou encore l’utilisation à la marge de comptes individuels.

In talent-intensive jobs, workers’ quality is revealed by their performance. This enhances productivity and earnings, but also increases layoff risk. Firms cannot insure workers against this risk if they compete fiercely for talent. In this case, the more risk-averse workers will choose less quality-revealing jobs. This lowers expected productivity and salaries. Public unemployment insurance corrects this inefficiency, enhancing employment in talent-sensitive industries, consistently with international evidence. Unemployment insurance dominates legal restrictions on firms’ dismissals, which penalize more talent-sensitive firms and thus depress expected productivity. Finally, unemployment insurance fosters education, by encouraging investment in risky human capital that enhances talent discovery.

Unemployment insurance is usually found to show negative effects in the transition from unemployment to a new job. However, the extent to which workers’ careers might improve or deteriorate as a result of the unemployment insurance system is not immediately clear. This paper addresses the effects of certain aspects of this system on employment stability by jointly accounting for benefits endogeneity, dynamic selection issues and occurrence dependence. The analysis is undertaken for a dual labour market, such as the market in Spain, where temporary and permanent workers differ with respect to numerous individual and labour market characteristics. We find that non-insured unemployed workers experience a greater rate of transition to employment than insured workers. But we also find that benefits encourage job stability for temporary workers not only by increasing subsequent job tenure but also by increasing the probability of entering into a permanent contract. Finally, we get that shortening the duration of the benefit entitlement period does not seem to lead to significant gains in overall employment stability, which increases at most by 4.3%. .

In the context of globalization, any company require well-trained workforce to ensure its economic development. In occupational structure analysis must take into account the prevailing conditions in the labor market not only by educational level. It turned out that employment opportunities are higher for educated population and not coincidentally between employment guidelines included in the Europe 2020 Strategy can be found guidance on the development of a well-qualified workforce, which responding to labor market needs.

The purpose of this paper is to present the influence of the tax burden on employment rate of labor starting from the comparison made between the 28 member states of the European Union.

Recent research has demonstrated that some households cut back on expenditures in an unemployment spell. Moreover, some of these households respond to variation in the transitory income provided by unemployment insurance benefits. This suggests that these households are constrained in the sense that they respond to variations in current income even if these do not have any permanent impact. In this paper we take up the question of how households in temporarily straitened circumstances cut back and how they spend marginal dollars of transfer income. Our theoretical and empirical analysis emphasises the importance of allowing for the fact that households buy durable as well as non-durable goods. The theoretical analysis shows that in the short run households can significantly cut back on total expenditures without a significant fall in welfare if they concentrate their budget reductions on durables. We present an empirical analysis based on a Canadian survey of workers who experienced a job separation. Exploiting changes in the unemployment insurance system over our sample period we show that cuts in UI benefits lead to reductions in total expenditure with a stronger impact on clothing than on food expenditures. These effects are particularly strong for households with no liquid assets and/or households in which the lost income was ‘important’ for the household.

Recent empirical literature finds very limited average effects of generous unemployment benefits on match quality. This study examines those effects in a setting where they could be large. We focus on workers with low employability and evaluate the impact of a large increase in potential benefit duration from 7 to 15 months. Our regression discontinuity design does not elicit significant short-term or medium-term effects on either employment duration or wages, whereas we find large positive effects on unemployment and non-employment duration.

We develop an empirical search-matching model which is suitable for analyzing the wage, employment and welfare impact of regulation in a labor market with heterogeneous workers and jobs. To achieve this we develop an equilibrium model of wage determination and employment which extends the current literature on equilibrium wage determination with matching and provides a bridge between some of the most prominent macro models and microeconometric research. The model incorporates productivity shocks, long-term contracts, on-the-job search and counter-offers. Importantly, the model allows for the possibility of assortative matching between workers and jobs due to complementarities between worker and job characteristics. We use the model to estimate the potential gain from optimal regulation and we consider the potential gains and redistributive impacts from optimal unemployment benefit policy. Here optimal policy is defined as that which maximizes total output and home production, accounting for the various constraints that arise from search frictions. The model is estimated on the NLSY using the method of moments.

Using data for 51 manufacturing and service sector for the period 1970-2005 in 14 countries, this paper show that employment protection legislation has a negative and significant effect on growth of value added and hours of work in more human capital intensive sectors. We argue that labour market regulation has a negative impact on the technology adoption mechanism through its heterogeneous impact on firms workforce adjustment requirements. In fact, technology adoption depends both on the skill level of the workforce and the capacity of firms to optimally adjust their employment levels as technology changes. As a consequence, firing costs have a relatively stronger impact in sectors in which technology adoption is more important. Our empirical results are robust to various sensitivity checks such as interactions of human capital intensity with other country level variables, of employment protection with other sector level variables and endogeneity of firing restrictions. We also show that the negative effect of EPL is stronger the smaller the distance from the technology frontier and after the 1990s.

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of short-time work [STW] extensions - e.g. relaxing eligibility criteria or implementing new STW schemes - in the OECD during and after the Great Recession. First, we find that the dampening effect of STW on the unemployment rate diminishes at higher take-up rates. Second, only countries with preexisting STW schemes were able to fully exploit the benefits of STW. Third, the effects of STW are strongest when GDP growth is deeply negative at the beginning of recessions. Our results indicate that STW is most effective when used as a fast-responding automatic stabilizer. published

We provide a life-cycle framework for comparing insurance and disincentive effects of disability benefits. The risks that individuals face and the parameters of the Disability Insurance (DI) program are estimated from consumption, health, disability insurance, and wage data. We characterize the effects of disability insurance and study how policy reforms impact behavior and welfare. DI features high rejection rates of disabled applicants and some acceptance of healthy applicants. Despite worse incentives, welfare increases as programs become less strict or generosity increases. Disability insurance interacts with welfare programs: making unconditional means-tested programs more generous improves disability insurance targeting and increases welfare. (JEL D14, J24, J65)

We examine the proposition that the Hartz reforms offset the GFC’s effect on unemployment (leading to the †German miracle†) and the GFC offset the Hartz reform’s effects on reallocation, in Germany (leading to the reallocation puzzle) over the period 2005-2010. To do so, we use a labor reallocation model based on Lucas and Prescott (1974), but with the additional features of unemployment benefits and rest unemployment. The model generates two simple conditions that must hold for two events to simultaneously offset each other in this way. We estimate the key parameters of the model to assess the extent to whether these conditions were satisfied in Germany at that time. We find that the observed drop in productivity due to the GFC (6.6%) fell somewhat short of the drop required to explain the reallocation puzzle (10.1%). Conditional on this offset taking place, the observed percentage drop in unemployment benefits (26.7%) was approximately four times that required (6.6%) for the German miracle.

In contrast to the recently decreasing unemployment rates in the EU, long-term unemployment remains at alarming levels. An economic recovery will not be sufficient to get all long-term unemployed back to work; rather, there is a need for effective policies addressing the long-term unemployed. To address these issues, this paper starts with an interpretation of standard measures of long-term unemployment and alternative measures of long-term non-employment. Next, we take a closer look at active labor market policies such as training, subsidized employment and public work and investigate which kind is most effective for the reintegration of long-term unemployed persons. Subsequently, the special role of Public Employment Services (PES) and the importance of an individual approach and targeting is stressed to increase the employability of hard-to-place and distant jobseekers from the labor market. Furthermore, we take into account the role of alternative benefit systems for working-age non-employed people. In the final section, we conclude and offer policy advice with a particular focus on the EU.

In this paper I examine the rates at which adults in households recently receiving Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) become jobless, apply for and receive unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, and participate in publicly funded employment services. I also investigate the correlation of UI and employment services receipt with maintenance of self-sufficiency through return to work and independence from TANF. The analysis is based on person-level administrative program records from four of the nine largest states between 1997 and 2003. Evidence suggests that three-quarters of new TANF leavers experience joblessness within three years, and one-quarter of the newly jobless apply for UI benefits. About 87 percent of UI applicants have sufficient prior earnings to qualify for UI benefits; however, only about 44 percent qualify based on their job separation reasons. Among all UI applicants, TANF leavers were found to have much higher rates of voluntary quits and employer dismissals than non-TANF leavers. Nonetheless, 50 percent of TANF leavers who apply for UI ultimately receive benefits. Public employment services are used by one-quarter of newly jobless TANF leavers. Among UI applicants, more than 75 percent use public employment services whether they receive UI benefits or not, while only 14 percent of newly jobless TANF leavers who do not apply for UI choose to use public employment services. Among TANF leavers who become jobless and apply for UI, the rate of return to TANF is lower for those who receive UI benefits. Rates of return to TANF are highest among nonbeneficiary UI applicants and non-UI applicants with low recent earnings.

Recent labour market reforms in Europe have been aimed at activating non-employed people and shortening unemployment duration. While this should indisputably be a central policy aim, the exclusive focus on quick re-employment neglects the importance of its quality and stability. Therefore, this paper analyses the effect of labour market policy on re-employment stability in Europe. Combining EU-SILC longitudinal survey data with macro-data on labour market policy, we conduct multi-level survival analysis. Empirical evidence suggests that countries with more generous unemployment insurance and higher active labour market policy (ALMP) spending achieve more sustainable reintegration of previously unemployed workers. These results point to a policy trade-off between the well-confirmed disincentive and locking-in effect of unemployment benefits and ALMP programmes on the one hand, and their positive effect on re-employment stability on the other hand.

To evaluate search effort monitoring of unemployed workers, it is important to take account of post-unemployment wages and job-to-job mobility. We structurally estimate a job search model with endogenous job search effort by the unemployed along various search channels that deals with this. The data are from an experiment in the Netherlands in which the extent of monitoring is randomized. They include registers of post-unemployment outcomes like wages and job mobility, and survey data on measures of search behavior. As such we are the first to study monitoring effects on post-unemployment outcomes. Once employed, individuals have the opportunity to further improve their position by moving to better-paid jobs, and we find that this reduces the extent to which monitoring induces substitution towards formal search channels in unemployment. In general, job mobility compensates for adverse long-run effects of monitoring on wages. We use the structural estimates to compare monitoring to counterfactual policies against moral hazard, like re-employment bonuses and changes in the unemployment benefits path. Replacing monitoring by an over-all benefits reduction in a way that is neutral to the worker results in slightly smaller effects with lower administrative costs.

We estimate the impact of the 2009 financial rescue of two large American automobile companies (General Motors and Chrysler) on unemployment in Michigan. We conservatively estimate that the auto bailout saved about 7,700 workers from unemployment each month over a period of four-and-a-half years. This translates to a public savings of between $1.3 and $1.6 billion via lower transfer payments and higher tax revenues.

Young adults entering the labor force typically have little access to unemployment insurance or other formal insurance mechanisms. Instead, they rely on family insurance in the form of parental support to smooth consumption. We study the labor market response of Belgian young adults to decreases in parental support caused by parental job displacements. Our estimates correct for unobserved heterogeneity by using the timing of parental shocks before and after labor market entry. We find that a child whose parents lose a job prior to the child's labor market entry is, on average, induced to work 6% more in the 3 years following labor market entry than a child whose parents lose a job after the child's entry (where labor market entry is defined as the end of the child's full-time education). This effect is concentrated on the extensive margin, meaning that the child finds a job faster, and disappears within four years of entry. We find no evidence that parental support affects the quality of the initial job that entrants find.

This paper shows that health is an important determinant of labor market vulnerability during large economic crises. Using data on adults during Sweden’s unexpected economic crisis in the early 1990s, we show that early and later life health are important determinants of job loss after the crisis, but not before. Adults who were born with worse health (proxied by birth weight) and those who experience hospitalizations (and especially so for mental health related issues) in the pre-crisis period, are much more likely to lose their jobs and go on unemployment insurance after the crisis. These effects are concentrated in the private sector that happened to be more affected by the crisis. The results hold while controlling for individual education and occupational sorting prior to the crisis, and for controlling for family level characteristics by exploiting health differences within twin pairs. We conclude that poor health (both in early life and as adults) is an important indicator of vulnerability during economic shocks.

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school in the province of Barcelona. By using fixed effects, this paper is more likely to deal with the problem of selection into troubled firms which is prevalent in the literature. Fixed effect estimates show that students experience a negative and significant decrease on average grades of about 13% of a standard deviation after father's job loss. The impact of paternal job loss is not homogeneous across students, but it is largely concentrated among children whose fathers suffer long unemployment spells after job loss and students in already disadvantaged families in terms of the father's education level. These results suggest that paternal job loss is a mechanism through which further inequalities might develop during and after a deep economic crisis.

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school in the province of Barcelona. By using fixed effects, this paper is more likely to deal with the problem of selection into troubled firms which is prevalent in the literature. Fixed effect estimates show that students experience a negative and significant decrease on average grades of about 13% of a standard deviation after father's job loss. The impact of paternal job loss is not homogeneous across students, but it is largely concentrated among children whose fathers suffer long unemployment spells after job loss and students in already disadvantaged families in terms of the father's education level. These results suggest that paternal job loss is a mechanism through which further inequalities might develop during and after a deep economic crisis.

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A “culture of unemployment” may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of unemployment benefits conditional on engagement in an incentive-enhancing activity (for example, work under state-sponsored employment schemes or participation in work-site-based training programs), a government can engineer a revision of the reference groups of an unemployed individual in order to induce him to seek work.

This paper explores the role of religion in mitigating the degree to which unemployment reduces subjective well-being and it examines its support of social programs. The paper goes beyond existing literature in three ways: It extends existing literature to Latin America and Caribbean countries; it explicitly includes analysis of two confounders (social capital and personal traits) ignored in existing literature; and it moves beyond correlation by using the propensity score method to tease out a causal relation between religion and well-being. We find that religion acts as a buffer: Unemployed religious people are relatively happier than are nonreligious unemployed people. However, in contrast with the existing literature, we find that religious people are relatively more supportive of public social policy.