This paper examines how unemployment affects retirement and whether the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system and Social Security (SS) system affect how older workers respond to labor market shocks. To do so, we use pooled cross-sectional data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS) as well...

This paper begins by discussing the nature of and rationale for social insurance programs. I then consider three political principles and four economic principles that could guide the design and reform of social insurance programs. These ideas are then applied to unemployment insurance, Social...

This chapter examines the labor supply effects of social insurance programs. We argue that this topic deserves separate treatment from the rest of the labor supply literature because individuals may be imperfectly informed as to the rules of the programs and because key parameters are likely to...

We develop a theory of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) that accounts for workers' job-search behavior and firms' hiring behavior. The optimal replacement rate of UI is the conventional Baily [1978]-Chetty [2006a] rate, which solves the trade-off between insurance and job-search incentives,...

Nearly two years after the official end of the "Great Recession," the labor market remains historically weak. One candidate explanation is supply-side effects driven by dramatic expansions of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefit durations, to as many as 99 weeks. This paper investigates the...

This paper uses the "Encuesta de Condiciones de Vida Y Trabajo" (EGVT) -- a survey of the labor force activity of over 61,000 persons in Spain in 1985 when unemployment exceeded 20%--to examine the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) and family status on long-run joblessness. It finds that (1)...

Distributions of tax rates on job acceptance and layoff margins are estimated for unemployed household heads and spouses under three benefit and tax rule scenarios: actual rules under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, rules as they would have been if they had not been changed since...

We consider nonparametric identification and estimation in a nonseparable model where a continuous regressor of interest is a known, deterministic, but kinked function of an observed assignment variable. This design arises in many institutional settings where a policy variable (such as weekly...

This paper studies the optimal redistribution of income inequality in a model with search and matching frictions in the labor market. We study this problem in the context of a directed search model of the labor market populated by homogeneous workers and heterogeneous firms. The optimal...

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...