We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on … unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted … for by the unprecedented extensions of unemployment benefit eligibility. In contrast to the existing recent literature …

-work time is substantial and varies positively with the local unemployment rate. While the average time spent by workers in non …-work conditional on any positive non-work rises with the unemployment rate, the fraction of workers who report time in non-work varies … amounts of non-work with wage rates and measures of unemployment benefits in state data linked to the ATUS, and it is …

-work time is substantial and varies positively with the local unemployment rate. While the average time spent by workers in non …-work conditional on any positive non-work rises with the unemployment rate, the fraction of workers who report time in non-work varies … amounts of non-work with wage rates and measures of unemployment benefits in state data linked to the ATUS, and it is …

Equilibrium labor market theory suggests that unemployment benefit extensions affect unemployment by impacting both job … vacancy creation and employment and a rise in unemployment …

, unemployment remained high. In this paper, we show that countercyclical unemployment benefit extensions lead to jobless recoveries …. We augment the standard Mortensen-Pissarides model to incorporate unemployment benefits expiration and state …-dependent extensions of unemployment benefits. In the model, an extension of unemployment benefits slows down the recovery of vacancy …

-work time is substantial and varies positively with the local unemployment rate. While the average time spent by workers in non …-work conditional on any positive non-work rises with the unemployment rate, the fraction of workers who report time in non-work varies … amounts of non-work with wage rates and measures of unemployment benefits in state data linked to the ATUS, and it is …

Countercyclical unemployment benefit extensions in the United States act as a propagation mechanism, contributing to … both the high persistence of unemployment and its weak correlation with productivity. We show this by modifying an … otherwise standard frictional model of the labor market to incorporate a stochastic and state-dependent process for unemployment …

We study the optimal provision of unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle. We consider an equilibrium … optimal benefit is decreasing in current productivity and decreasing in current unemployment. Optimal benefits are therefore … lowest when current productivity is high and current unemployment is high. The optimal path of benefits reacts non …