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...

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...

A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-time unemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as they prefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an...

This paper studies optimal unemployment bene…fit levels and optimal proportional income tax rates over the business cycle. Previous research suggests that policy makers should make unemployment insurance (UI) dependent on the business cycle because the UI system can be used to smooth...

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...