During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the...

We study how timing assumption matters for the commitment problem and time inconsistency in search models with unemployment insurance. We analyze the Markov equilibrium without commitment and the Ramsey policy with commitment under two different timings. The first timing is where consumption...

During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the...