Unemployment Insurance in Theory and Practice

A hallmark of modern labor economics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance provides a good illustration. New theoretical approaches, in particular job-search theory, have inspired a large amount of empirical research, some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy. The paper presents a broad survey and an assessment of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance as it has evolved since the 1970s.