Unemployment insurance replacement rates world-wide are well below 100 percent, a fact often attributed to search moral hazard concerns. As Blanchard and Tirole (2008) have illustrated, however, neither search nor layoff moral hazard (firing cost) distortions need arise in first-best insurance...

Job displacement in the U.S. is a serious threat to the earnings of long-tenured workers, through both (i) unemployment spells and (ii) reduced reemployment wages. Although full insurance requires both unemployment benefits and wage insurance, supply difficulties limit actual-loss insurance, and...

Unemployment insurance experts lament the low Federal taxable wage base (TWB), last increased to $7000 per worker in 1982. The Federal TWB sets only a system minimum and by 2014 all but two states had TWBs that exceeded the minimum, opening up state TWB choice for study. States do align TWB with...

Job displacement insurance in the United States includes publicly mandated unemployment benefits and privately contracted severance pay, a scheduled benefit designed to compensate workers for reemployment wage losses and residual unemployment losses. Asymmetric information problems profoundly...

Mandated severance benefits have been the focus of much analysis, motivated largely by firing cost concerns. Less attention has been paid to voluntary systems, as in the U.S., although theory would suggest that these too induce firing costs. In a voluntary system, of course, benefit generosity...

Formal employer-provided severance pay plans became common during the first years of the Great Depression, an apparent reaction to the large-scale layoffs of long-service workers under difficult market conditions. Reasonably consistent series are constructed for severance plan coverage and...

In the U.S. economy, approximately 100 million workers are matched with market work activities on any given day. Millions more are matched with the nonmarket activities of various kinds, including child rearing, the home production of a variety of goods and services, and schooling. Economic...

Denmark has drawn much attention for its active labor market policies, but is almost unique in offering a voluntary public unemployment insurance program requiring a significant premium payment. A safety net program — a less generous, means-tested social assistance plan — completes the...

Denmark has drawn much attention for its active labor market policies, but is almost unique in offering a voluntary public unemployment insurance program requiring a significant premium payment. A safety net program – a less generous, means-tested social assistance plan – completes the...

I consider the health, family structure, and labor supply inter-relationships at both a theoretical and empirical level. The paper is organized in the following way. SectionI introduces the material. In Section II, a theoretical model of family time allocation among market, home, and health...