Suchergebnisse

We study unemployment insurance in a framework where the main source of heterogeneity among agents is the type of household they live in: some agents live alone while others live with their spouses as a family. Our exercise is motivated by the fact that married individuals can rely on spousal income to smooth labor market shocks, while singles cannot. We extend a version of the standard incomplete-markets model to include two-agent households and calibrate it to the US economy with special emphasis on matching differences in labor market transitions across gender and marital status as well as aggregate wealth moments. Our central finding is that changes to the current unemployment insurance program are valued differently by married and single households. In particular, a more generous unemployment insurance reduces the welfare of married households significantly more than that of singles and vice versa. We show that this result is driven by the amount of self-insurance existing in married households, and thus, we highlight the interplay between self- and government-provided insurance and its implication for policy.

To deal with the high level of unemployment during the Great Recession, lawmakers extended the availability of unemployment benefits—all the way to 99 weeks in the states where unemployment was highest. A recent study has found that the extensions served to increase unemployment significantly by putting upward pressure on wages, leading to less jobs creation by firms. We replicate the methodology of this study with an updated and longer sample and find a much smaller impact. We estimate that the impact of extending benefits on unemployment through wages and job creation can, at its highest, account for only one-fourth of the increase in the unemployment rate; an impact that is much lower than other estimates in the literature.

"Job search models offer two complementary predictions about the effects of unemployment benefits on job search outcomes among unemployed workers. By raising workers' reservation wages, unemployment benefits should contribute to both prolonged spell duration and improved post-unemployment job quality. In contrast to many previous empirical studies that have addressed the negative benefit effect on duration only, the current paper jointly addresses the causal effect of unemployment benefits on both unemployment duration and post-unemployment wages. Based on panel data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the German Socio-Economic Panel for the 1980s and 1990s, the paper establishes empirical support for both benefit effects in both countries. If anything, there is evidence of a slightly more negative duration effect for the U.S. data, while positive UI effects on post-unemployment wages are stronger in the German data. In any event, the empirical estimates for the positive effects of unemployment benefits on wages substantially exceed those obtained in Addison and Blackburn's recent paper based on Displaced Worker Survey data. In contrast to their findings, the data also provide ample evidence of stronger UI effects in the lower tails of the wage change distribution. At the cost of a fairly small prolongation of unemployment duration, unemployment benefits thus substantially reduce the scar effects of unemployment on workers' future job records." (author's abstract)

"Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the reemployment probability in West Germany for individuals who entered UI receipt between April 2000 and March 2001. By applying a matching approach that takes timing of events into account, we identify the ex post effect of UI sanctions. As a robustness check a difference-in-differences matching estimator is applied. The results indicate positive effects on the employment probability in regular employment for both women and men." (authors abstract)