We design and field an innovative survey of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients that yields new insights about wage stickiness on the layoff margin. Most UI recipients express a willingness to accept wage cuts of 5-10 percent to save their jobs, and one third would accept a 25 percent cut....

In this paper, we present a matching model with adverse selection that explains why flows into and out of unemployment are much lower in Europe compared to North America, while employment-to-employment flows are similar in the two continents. In the model, firms use discretion in terms of whom...

We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

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...

The objective of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the consequences of worker displacement in France and the United States. I estimate wage losses of displaced workers in the two countries and examine the relative contribution of two important sources of post-displacement wage...

This testimony makes three main points. First, income volatility, especially when it involves income declines, imposes significant hardships on American families. It heightens stress about finances and may increase household living expenses. These hardships are most pronounced for middle-and...

Industry wage differentials may result either from the structure of the industry (demand type) or human capital (supply type) characteristics of the employed labour force. This study uses two major data sets from Germany and the US that allow the investigation of the effects of these demand and...

In this paper, U.S. data on labor market histories of displaced workers are used to quantify the effect of Unemployment Insurance Compensation (UIC) on both unemployment and employment durations. This results in the first available assessment of the effect that UIC has on the fraction of time...

The evolution of the temporary staffing industry (TSI) in the US is examined, with particular reference to the structural functions of temporary work during the boom of the 1990s, the flexible recession of 2001, and the subsequent jobless recovery. It is argued that the TSI is increasingly...