This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI...

At the turn of the 20th century, state and local governments in the United States began to establish public employment offices. These non-profit governmental organizations match job seekers and businesses, one of their main objectives being to protect job seekers from fraudulent activities by...

The paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies...

This paper argues that unemployment insurance increases labor productivity by encouraging workers to seek higher productivity jobs, and by encouraging firms to create those jobs. We use a quantitative general equilibrium model to investigate whether this effect is comparable in magnitude to the...

While there has been considerable discussion of the adequacy of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits as a form of income replacement, there is little evidence on the other resources that the unemployed have to finance their unemployment spells. In this paper I focus on focus on one form of...

In the last two decades, U.S. policies have moved from the use of incentives to the use of sanctions to promote work effort in social programs. Surprisingly, except for anecdotes, there is very little systematic evidence of the extent to which sanctions applied to the abusive use of social...