Contrary to the conventional view that unemployment insurance serves to directly increase the rate of unemployment as well as reducing an economy's competitiveness by increasing the market wage of labor, the argument presented in this paper is that this worldview critically depends on...

We explore the extent to which increased import competition affected crime in US labor markets between 1990 and 2007, and whether access to unemployment insurance attenuated this relationship. In the average labor market, property crime rates rose by 1.5 percent following a $1000 per worker...