Shortening the Potential Duration of Unemployment Benefits does not affect the Quality of Post-Unemployed Jobs : Evidence from a Natural Experiment

This paper investigates how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the quality of post-unemployment jobs.It takes advantage of a natural experiment introduced by a change in Slovenia's unemployment insurance law that substantially reduced the potential benefit duration.Although this reduction strongly increased job finding rates, the quality of the postunemployment jobs remained unaffected: the paper finds that the law change had no effect on either the type of the contract (temporary vs. permanent), the duration of the post-unemployment jobs, or the wage earned in this job.