We explore the implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by unemployment accounts (UA). Under the UA system, employed people would be required to make ongoing contributions to their unemployment accounts, and the balances in these accounts would then be available to...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the longterm unemployed) and are provided only for a...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB)systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

The paper examines the relative effectiveness of two policy proposals in reducing unemployment and working poverty: unemployment vouchers and low-wage subsidies. The unemployment vouchers are targeted exclusively at the unemployed (especially the long-term unemployed) and are provided only for a...

We explore the far-reaching implications of replacing current unemployment benefit (UB) systems by an unemployment accounts (UA) system. Under the UA system, employed people are required to make ongoing contributions to their UAs and the balances in these accounts are available to them during...

This paper explores the influence of on-the-job training on the employment effect of firing costs. It shows that on-the-job training (generating firm specific skills) causes firing costs to have a contractionary influence on average employment (over the booms and recessions of the business cycle).

This paper explores the sources of bargaining power in wage negotiations. In the standard analyses of wage bargaining, the negotiation partners are specified a priori, and thus it is impossible to address the question of how they achieve and retain their negotiating positions, on which their...

This paper explores the influence of wage and price staggering on monetary persistence. We show that, for plausible parameter values, wage and price staggering are complementary in generating monetary persistence. We do so by proposing the new measure of quantitative inertia, after discussing...

It is common knowledge that the standard New Keynesian model is not able to generate a persistent response in output to temporary monetary shocks. We show that this shortcoming can be remedied in a simple and intuitively appealing way through the introduction of labor turnover costs (such as...

This paper addresses the question of why high unemployment rates tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages relative to productivity have fallen). We suggest that the longer people are unemployed, the greater is their cumulative likelihood of falling...