Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

In the midst of sharply rising long-term unemployment, a series of unemployment benefit (UB) eligibility extensions raised the regular 26-week limit to as many as 99 weeks in some states. In response, leading economists have invoked the ‘laws of economics' to warn that the extensions may be...

This paper studies the effect of unemployment benefits on the unemployment and subsequent employment duration using individual data from the European Community Household Panel, for France, Germany, and the UK. The empirical analysis is based on a two-state mixed proportional hazard model...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the...

This paper exploits survey information on reservation wages and data on actual wages from the European Community Household Panel to deduce in the manner of Lancaster and Chesher (1983) additional parameters of a stylized structural search model; specifically, reservation wage and...

This paper examines the effects of unemployment insurance on escape rates from unemployment using data from the 1998 Displaced Worker Survey. Transitions from unemployment to employment are modeled using a flexible representation of the baseline hazard function and allowing for discrete changes...

The trend towards activation has been one of the major issues in recent welfare and labour market reforms in Europe and the US. Despite considerable initial variation across national models with respect to the scope and intensity of activation, redefining the link between social protection and...

Over the past several decades, the rate at which regular unemployment insurance recipients run out of benefits before they have found jobs, even in a strong labor market, has been gradually rising. For example, in 1973, 27.4 percent of UI recipients exhausted their benefits; in 2007 (with a...