We argue that labor market institutions are endogenous. Our analysis focuses on the government's decision to set unemployment benefits in response to an unemployment shock in a simple, reduced-form model of the labor market. It is found that the largest increases in benefits should occur in...

In 1990 Colombia replaced its traditional system of severance payments with a new system of severance payments savings accounts (SPSAs). Although severance payments often are justified on the grounds that they provide insurance against earnings loss, they also increase costs for employers and...

Skills shortages have developed in certain fields and regions in recent years. Earnings premiums for people in some professions, notably health, engineering and skilled trades have increased. And vacancy rates have risen for skilled trades, with the increase being particularly large in Alberta...

Under the current Employment Insurance (EI) system, long-lasting EI benefits are more easily accessed in regions with high unemployment rates than in regions with low unemployment rates where workers face tighter restrictions to access short-lived benefits. This complicated screening procedure,...

How do job losers use default -- a phenomenon 6x more prevalent than bankruptcy -- as a type of "informal" unemployment insurance, and more importantly, what are the social costs and benefits of this behavior? To this end, I establish several new facts: (i) job loss is the main reason for...

In this paper we analyze the unintended effects on mobility of a national place-based policy (SIPTEA) that provides greater unemployment protection in two lagging regions of southern Spain (namely, Extremadura and Andalucía). Using a border identification strategy and (1981 and 1991) census...

This paper argues that a risk-averse worker's after-tax reservation wage encodes all the relevant information about her welfare. This insight leads to a novel test for the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wages to unemployment benefits. Some...

This paper investigates the effect of sanctions of unemployment insurance benefits on the exit rate from unemployment for a sample of Danish unemployed. According to the findings are that even moderate sanctions have rather large effects. For both males and females the exit rate increases by...

We propose a multi-country model with occupational choice, heterogeneous firms, unemployment, and revenue-generating tariffs to study the aggregate and distributional consequences of tariff wars in a unified framework. Motivated by the 2018 global tariff war, we calibrate the model to fit a...