In contrast with a large body of existing literature, Nekoei and Weber (2017, NW henceforth) find a positive effect of unemployment insurance on job quality. This comment shows that NW's finding is driven by unnecessarily large bandwidths used in their regression discontinuity analysis. When the...

This paper investigates long-term returns from unemployment compensation, exploiting variation from the UK JSA reform of 1996, which implied a major increase in job search requirements for eligibility and in the related administrative hurdle. Search theory predicts that such changes should raise...

Recent papers identify the effects of unemployment insurance and potential benefit duration (PBD) on unemployment duration and reemployment wages using quasi-experiments. To make known problems of heterogeneity in quasi-experiments tractable, they often use models of job search, but we argue...

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...

The analysis is about the compulsory German unemployment insurance system (GUIS). It is known that GUIS did nothing to prevent the continuous rise of the rate of unemployment since the 1970s. The empirical literature about GUIS indicates that the few endeavours to increase incentives to work...

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

The impact of the administration of unemployment benefits on time spent unemployed is a neglected issue in discussion of incentive effects in Central and Eastern Europe. We use Labour Force Survey data, administrative registers and inspection of benefit office practices to show that there is...

The impact of the administration of unemployment benefits on time spent unemployed is a neglected issue in discussion of incentive effects in Central and Eastern Europe. We use Labour Force Survey data, ad-ministrative registers and inspection of benefit office practices to show that there is...