This paper analyzes unemployment insurance (UI) schemes in the presence of mobile workers and trade unions at industry or regional level that are capable of internalizing the effect of wage demands on UI contribution rates. We compare two types of existing UI systems. When UI is organized at...

Our study compares the efficiency of centralized and decentralized unemployment insurance programs in a state union. We use a model of two countries with collective bargaining for regional gross wages. The labor force and the firms are partially mobile across the member states of the state...

We use linked longitudinal data on employers and employees to estimate how the 2003-2005 Hartz reforms affected the wages of displaced German workers after they returned to work. We also present a simple new method to decompose the wage effects into components attributable to selection on...

Our study compares the efficiency of unemployment insurance programs in a state union. A centralized insurance pools the cost of unemployment which implies a collective bargaining in the countries that leads to excessively high wages and inefficient insurance. Those high wages attract workers...

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of...

I study the labor market risks associated with being self-employed. I document that the self-employed are subject to larger earnings fluctuations than employees and that they frequently transition into unemployment. Given that the self-employed are not eligible to unemployment insurance, I...

This paper uses the Austrian Social Security Register (ASSD) to explore what information firms infer from the three common types of displacement: individual layoffs, individuals displaced due to a closure and individuals displaced due to a mass layoff. I bring together two strands of the...

We evaluate the quantity-quality trade-off on the labor market by estimating an augmented matching function weighting the matches by quality measures. We use the approach to evaluate the German labor market reforms conducted between 2003 and 2005. Indeed, we find a significant quantity-quality...