The costs of searching for a job vacancy are typically associated with friction that deters or delays employment of potentially productive individuals. We demonstrate that in a labor market with moral hazard where effort is noncontractible, job search costs play a positive role, whose effect may...

In the midst of sharply rising long-term unemployment, a series of unemployment benefit (UB) eligibility extensions raised the regular 26-week limit to as many as 99 weeks in some states. In response, leading economists have invoked the ‘laws of economics' to warn that the extensions may be...

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...

This paper proposes a protocol for considering the social cost of unemployment by taking into account three different aspects: incidence, severity and hysteresis. Incidence refers to the conventional unemployment rate; severity takes in both unemployment duration and the associated income loss;...

Extended unemployment benefits programs are triggered by the state insured unemployment rate while intrastate demand conditions often vary dramatically. Some tight local labor markets may therefore exhibit a large effect of extended unemployment benefits. Using a competing risk duration model,...

Fifteen years after the introduction of highly ambitious social insurance programs for urban Chinese workers, a large number of them remain un-insured. This paper examines the relationship between labor market conditions and social insurance participation among industrial firms in the pre-crisis...

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...

Starting in January 2003, Germany implemented the first two so-called Hartz reforms, followed by the third and fourth packages of Hartz reforms in January 2004 and January 2005, respectively. The aim of these reforms was to accelerate labor market flows and reduce unemployment duration. Without...

With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

The existing literature assumes that unemployment insurance (UI) affects the labor market through the job finding rate of eligible workers. I argue that this focus is too narrow. I show evidence for UI effects through three other margins: (i) search externalities; (ii) takeup of other welfare...