Unemployment Insurance in Theory and Practice.

A Hallmark of modern labor conomics 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 search, some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy. The paper presents a broad survey ans an assessment of the economics analysis of unemployment insurance as it has evolved since the 1970s.