Recent efforts to expand unemployment insurance (UI) eligibility are expected to increase low-earning workers' access to UI. Although the expansion's aim is to smooth the income and consumption of previously ineligible workers, it is possible that UI benefits simply displace other sources of...

The paper identifies key labor market and institutional differences between developed and developing countries, analyzes how these differences affect the working of the standard, OECD-style unemployment insurance (UI) program, and derives a desirable design of unemployment benefit program in...

The current unemployment insurance and employment protection legislation were set up in an economic environment in which relationships between workers and firms were typically long-lasting and stable. The increasing globalisation of the economy and the rapid technological and organisational...

The paper argues that a comprehensive activation strategy is called for – in both unemployment and disability insurance – to minimize the conflict between income insurance and work incentives and to prevent the economic crisis from causing a long - lasting decline in labor force...

In this paper, U.S. data on labor market histories of displaced workers are used to quantify the effect of Unemployment Insurance Compensation (UIC) on both unemployment and employment durations. This results in the first available assessment of the effect that UIC has on the fraction of time...

We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married...

Unemployment insurance schemes include conditions on past employment history as part of the eligibility conditions. This aspect is often neglected in the literature which primarily focuses on benefit levels and benefit duration. In a search-matching framework we show that benefit duration and...

Contrary to standard search model predictions, prior studies failed to estimate a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. This paper estimates a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based regression discontinuity in Austrian administrative data. A search model...