This paper provides an analysis of recent reforms of tax-benefit systems and a preliminary assessment of their impact on financial incentives to work and on labour supply. Many Member States have introduced policies to “make work pay” and have targeted low-wage workers with the aim of...

Job displacement insurance typically includes both unemployment benefits and lump-sum severance pay, and each has provoked policy concerns. Unemployment insurance concerns have centered on distorted job search/offer acceptance decisions by the worker, severance-induced firing cost concerns on...

Earnings losses from permanent job separations are a serious threat to the financial security of long-tenured workers. Job displacement insurance is presumably designed to offset these losses, but evidence suggests that consumption smoothing among the long-tenured displaced is seriously...

We empirically investigate how two-tier unemployment compensation schemes affect the profile of re-employment hazards. We exploit the aggravation of an existing two-tier scheme in Germany in 2005 and estimate its impact on re-employment rates at different durations. For the short-term...

In 2005, the unemployment compensation for long-term unemployed was reduced in Germany. We examine how this reform affected the transition probability to employment. Additionally, we inspect how this effect varies over unemployment duration. We estimate proportional hazard models using German...

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...