productivity risk is greater than the value of unemployment insurance which provides (partial) insurance against employment risk …

In this paper we test for the existence of compensating differentials for unemployment risk in an era before … unemployment insurance. Using information gathered from manufacturing worker surveys conducted during the 1880s in New Jersey, we … find that workers who faced higher probabilities of predictable unemployment spells received a small compensating …

-financed unemployment insurance. The key element in the analysis is that unemployment insurance is more attractive than risk shifting as a … way for workers to obtain income during unemployment. The paper also analyses the effects of risk shifting and … unemployment insurance on the magnitude of employment fluctuations. The analysis implies that, given the existence of unemployment …

adjustment costs can cause a mean-preserving increase in unemployment risk to lead to increased consumption. The predictions of … risk as their unemployment shocks are more highly correlated. Such couples spend more on owner-occupied housing than other … higher moving costs, or when unemployment insurance provides a less generous safety net …

Why is unemployment higher for younger individuals? We address this question in a frictional model of the labor market … observed age differences in unemployment which, as in the data, are due to differences in job separation rates …

This paper draws on household survey data from countries of all income levels to measure how average unemployment rates … vary with income per capita. We document that unemployment is increasing with GDP per capita. Furthermore, we show that … this fact is accounted for almost entirely by low-educated workers, whose unemployment rates are strongly increasing in GDP …