Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

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...

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...

I take a control function approach to overcome the difficulty raised by the simultaneity issue in the estimation of the impact of unemployment duration on re-employment wages. I consider three alternative instruments, which are based on the rules of the potential duration of unemployment...

We evaluate the effect of a drastic cut in potential benefit duration, reducing the maximum length of UI benefits from 9 to 3 months in Hungary at the end of 2011. We rely on rich longitudinal matched administrative data, which allows us to obtain information on a large sample of UI benefit...

Flexibility in the labour market is important for macroeconomic stability. The Danish labour market has been highlighted as being flexible, which this study confirms using micro data from 1980 to the present. Unemployment insured workers are found to be less geographical job mobile than workers...

We provide the first systematic evidence on the effectiveness of a contested policy in Germany to help displaced workers. So-called “transfer companies” (Transfergesellschaften) employ displaced workers for a fixed period, during which time workers are provided with job-search assistance and...

This paper investigates how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the quality of post-unemployment jobs. It takes advantage of a natural experiment introduced by a change in Slovenia's unemployment insurance law that substantially reduced the potential benefit duration....

We show that workers displaced from their stable jobs during mass-layoffs in 1982 recession in Germany suffered permanent earnings losses of 10-15% lasting at least 15 years. These estimates are obtained using data and methodology comparable to similar studies for the United States. Exploiting...

This paper estimates the causal effect of long-term unemployment on wages. Job search theory implies that if Unemployment Insurance (UI) extensions do not affect wages conditional on the month of unemployment exit, then reservation wages do not bind on average. Then, UI extensions affect mean...