This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers.The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

Change is an enduring feature of the economy and the labour market, even in normal times. The importance of adjusting to change, and of policies that promote adjustment, has been a recurring theme throughout David Dodge’s distinguished career. This paper deals with “displaced...

This paper provides a comprehensive account of the regulations governing the systems of unemployment support and social assistance in post-communist Poland. To provide a solid foundation for a further discussion of these issues, the paper extensively characterizes the Polish labor force in terms...

The paper examines the influence of unemployment insurance on the duration of employment spells in Canada using the 1988-90 Labour Market Activity Survey. The primary focus of the paper is to evaluate whether estimated UI effects are sensitive to the degree to which institutional rules and...

This paper examines the role of EI in providing support to “displaced workers,†those who permanently lose their jobs because of changing circumstances. Adjusting to change benefits Canadians as a whole. However, some workers suffer much more from job loss than do others. Those who...

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable.We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...