This paper analyzes a social insurance system that integrates unemployment insurance with a pension program through an individual account, allowing workers to borrow against their future wage income to finance consumption during an unemployment episode and thus improving their search incentives...

In an earlier paper, we showed that integrated individual accounts, allowing individuals to borrow against future pensions when they are unemployed, can be welfare increasing, because it allows increased inter-temporal consumption smoothing without attenuating incentives to search. Here, we...

Globally, an estimated 734 million jobs will be required between 2010 and 2030 to accommodate recent and ongoing demographic shifts, account for plausible changes in labour force participation rates, and achieve target unemployment rates of at or below 4 percent for adults and at or below 8...

We quantify the importance of precautionary labor supply using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for 2001-2012. We estimate dynamic labor supply equations augmented with a measure of wage risk. Our results show that married men choose about 2.5% of their hours of work or one week...

Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that paternal unemployment has a surprisingly positive causal effect on the "Big 5" personality traits of children aged 17 to 25. In particular, our results from longitudinal value-added models for personality suggest...

This study asked whether immigrants suffer more from job loss than German natives do. Compositional, psychosocial, and normative differences between these groups suggest that various factors intensifying the negative impact of unemployment on subjective well-being are either more prevalent, more...

This paper examines experienced well-being of employed and unemployed workers. We use the survey-adapted day reconstruction method (DRM) of the Innovation Sample of the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP-IS) to analyze the role of the employment status for well-being, incorporating complete...

This paper estimates the effect of an individual’s unemployment on the level of social participation of their spouse. Using German panel data, it is shown that unemployment has a strong negative effect on public social activities of both directly and indirectly affected spouses. Private social...

Overindebted private households have created economic and political concern. Using measures of relative (over-) indebtedness which relate household income and debt services to different concepts of subsistence levels, this paper investigates whether severe household indebtedness is driven by...