The Canadian unemployment insurance program is designed to reflect the varying risk of joblessness across regions. Regions that are considered low-risk areas subsidize higher risk ones. A region's risk is typically proxied by its relative unemployment rate. We use a dynamic, heterogeneous-agent...

Unemployment insurance policies are multidimensional objects. They are typically defined by waiting periods, eligibility duration, benefit levels and asset tests when eligible, which make intertemporal or international comparisons difficult. To make things worse, labor market conditions, such as...

In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with an universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should...

In this paper we compare the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) with a universal basic income (UBI) system in an economy with idiosyncratic shocks to employment. Both policies provide a safety net in the face of idiosyncratic shocks. While the unemployment insurance program should do...

In the presence of even small moral hazard, Hansen & Imrohoroglu (1992) show that the unemployment insurance should be much less generous than without moral hazard. This has important implications in the light of recent reforms. We question this result by adding a social component to the model:...

The goal of this paper is to establish if unemployment insurance policies are more generous in Europe than in the United States, and by how much. We take the examples of France and one particular American state, Ohio, and use the methodology of Pallage, Scruggs and Zimmermann (2008) to find a...

In this paper, we develop a methodology to summarize the various policy parameters of an unemployment insurance scheme into a single generosity parameter. Unemployment insurance policies are multdimensional objects. They are typically defined by waiting periods, eligibility duration, benefit...