This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of...

Recently, some have wondered whether a fiscal stimulus plan could reduce the government's budget deficit. Many also worry that fiscal austerity plans will only bring higher deficits. Issues of this kind involve endogenous changes in tax revenues that occur when output, real wages, and other...

We analyze the general equilibrium effects of countercyclical unemployment benefit policies. Our heterogenous-agent model features costly job search with imperfect insurance of unemployment risk and individual savings. Our model predicts: (1) the additional unemployment under a countercyclical...

We construct and calibrate a general equilibrium business cycle model with unemployment and precautionary saving. We compute the cost of business cycles and locate the optimum in a set of simple cyclical fiscal policies. Our economy exhibits productivity shocks, giving firms an incentive to hire...

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, we find no statistically significant impact of...

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

We construct and calibrate a general equilibrium business cycle model with unemployment and precautionary saving. We compute the cost of business cycles and locate the optimum in a set of simple cyclical fiscal policies. Our economy exhibits productivity shocks, giving firms an incentive to hire...

I interpret the empirical evidence on government spending multipliers using an equilibrium model of unemployment in which workers are not fully insured against the risk of job loss. Consumption of resources by the government affects aggregate spending along two margins: (i) an intensive margin...

The paper analyzes the wage-employment effects of replacing unemployment benefits by negative income taxes. It first surveys the major equity and efficiency effects of unemployment benefits versus negative income taxes, and summarizes the salient features of many European unemployment benefit...

In this paper, I propose a new Keynesian DSGE model with labor market search and matching frictions which replicates the low volatility and the moderate procyclicality of the labor force participation rate, that are observed in the United States at business cycle frequency. That being so,it can...