This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects individuals’ job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months...

Caseworkers are the main human resources used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find...

Findings of prolonged non-employment spells due to more generous unemployment benefits are commonly seen as an indication of reduced job search effort and moral hazard behavior. However, to date, there is hardly any direct evidence of benefit-induced reductions in search effort. This paper...

This paper studies how the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects individuals' job search behavior and re-employment outcomes. We exploit an unexpected reform of the German unemployment insurance scheme in 2008, which increased the potential benefit duration from 12 to 15 months for...

Caseworkers are the main human resource used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find...

Enforcing the compliance with job search obligations is a core task of conditional benefit systems like unemployment insurance (UI) or welfare. For targeted policy design, it is key to understand how the enforcement regime affects job search outcomes. This paper provides first estimates that...

How effective are effort targets? This paper provides novel evidence on the effects of job search requirements on effort provision and labor market outcomes. Based on large-scale register data, we estimate the returns to required job search effort, instrumenting individual requirements with...

How effective are effort targets? This paper provides novel evidence on the effects of job search requirements on effort provision and labor market outcomes. Based on large-scale register data, we estimate the returns to required job search effort, instrumenting individual requirements with...

Caseworkers are the main human resources used to provide social services. This paper asks if, and how much, caseworkers matter for the outcomes of unemployed individuals. Using large-scale administrative data, I exploit exogenous variation in unplanned absences among Swiss UI caseworkers. I find...

Job search requirements constrain the effort choice of unemployment insurance recipients by enforcing a minimum number of monthly applications. This paper is the first to assess how individual search effort, job finding and job stability react to this constraint. Standard job search theory...