the long run effects of unemployment monitoring and work search programs experimental evidence from the united kingdom this article examines the long run effects of the restart unemployment program in the united kingdom the program aimed at the long term unemployed involved a combination of tighter monitoring of benefit eligibility rules and increased job search assistance we compare the employment behavior of a treatment group who participated in the scheme with that of a randomly chosen control group for whom participation was delayed while there is little evidence of a long term benefit for women the unemployment rate among males in the treatment group was six percentage points lower than that of the control group 5 years after the initial experiment

experimental evidence on unemployment insurance work search policies this paper describes findings from an experimental evaluation of alternative work search policies in the unemployment insurance ui program we find that the no work search treatment significantly increased ui receipt relative to the standard work search approach by 3 3 weeks and 265 per claimant and that the treatment with the most intensive requirements reduced ui payments by one half of a week or 70 per claimant the results suggest that work search requirements reduce ui spells by increasing the nonmonetary costs of remaining on ui rather than enhancing job search abilities we also find little treatment effects for wages earnings or total income suggesting that an increase in the nonmonetary costs of continued ui receipt are associated with more intensive job search rather than a reduction in the reservation wage

the estimated cost impact of privatizing student transportation in minnesota school districts student transportation makes up a substantial portion of a typical school district s operating budget and sub contracting bus service to private firms has been advanced by some as a way to reduce transportation costs previous studies have found conflicting evidence regarding the cost impact of privatization this paper seeks to improve on previous studies by estimating cost equations using data that spans six school years the primary result is that privatization acts to substantially increase transportation costs estimates using a pooled cross section predicted that going from fully outsourced to fully in house reduced costs by approximately 15 8 while the analogous estimate using a first differenced equation was a savings of 20 7

does a minimum job search requirement reduce time on unemployment payments evidence from the jobseeker diary in australia this study examines the impact of thejobseeker diary jsd a program designed to increase the job search effort of unemployed persons in australia the jsd program is distinguished by combining a focus on work search verification with large scale imple mentation applying a quasi experimental matching method to data on unemployment spells occurring in 1997 98 the authors find that jsd participation was associated with an increased rate of exit from unemployment payment recipiency and a shorter total time spent on payments payment receipt duration is estimated to have fallen for about one half of jsd participants the largest effects of the jsd occurred for payment recipients for whom labor demand conditions were the most favorable cost benefit analysis suggests a fairly large net societal gain per program participant this study examines a large scale interven tion intended to increase job search ef fort of unemployed persons in australia the intervention the jobseeker diary jsd is a work search verification program that re quires unemployment payment recipients to complete a fortnightly biweekly diary in which details of a specified minimum number of job applications must be recorded the scale of the jsd program and its focus on work search verification make it unique in the international context

punitive sanctions and the transition rate from welfare to work in the netherlands the average exit rate out of welfare is dramatically low most welfare recipients have to comply with guidelines on job search effort that are imposed by the welfare agency if they do not then a sanction in the form of a temporary benefit reduction can be imposed this article investigates the effect of such sanctions on the transition rate from welfare to work using a unique set of rich register data on welfare recipients we find that the imposition of sanctions substantially increases the individual transition rate from welfare to work

optimal welfare to work programs a welfare to work wtw program is a mix of government expenditures on various labour market policies targeted to the unemployed e g unemployment insurance m job search monitoring m social assistance sa wage subsidies this paper provides a dynamic principal agent framework suitable for analysing chief features of an optimal wtw program such as the sequence and duration of the different policies the dynamic pattern of payments along the unemployment spell and the emergence of taxes subsidies upon re employment the optimal program endogenously generates an absorbing policy of last resort social assistance characterized by a constant lifetime payment and no active participation by the agent human capital depreciation is a necessary condition for policy transitions to be part of an optimal wtw program the typical sequence of policies is quite simple the program starts with standard ui then switches into monitored search and finally into sa the optimal benefits are decreasing during unemployment insurance and constant during both jm and sa whereas taxes subsidies can be either increasing or decreasing with duration during ui they must decrease increase during a phase of jm in a calibration exercise we use our model to analyse quantitatively the features of the optimal program for the u s economy with respect to the existing u s system the optimal wtw scheme delivers sizeable welfare gains to unskilled workers because the incentives to search for a job can be retained even while delivering more insurance and using costly monitoring less intensively

lessons from the u s unemployment insurance experiments recent social experiments have evaluated two reforms of the unemployment insurance ui system reemployment bonuses and job search programs the bonus experiments show that economic incentives affect the length of ui receipt and provide weak evidence that an earlier return to work does not decrease earnings the experiments do not show the favorability of a permanent bonus program as they ignore its effect on the number of the claimants the job search experiments test several more promising reforms nearly all of the combinations of services and increased enforcement reduce ui receipt and have favorable cost benefit analyses earnings often increase though the estimates are imprecise

carrot and stick how reemployment bonuses and benefit sanctions affect exit rates from welfare summary to increase the exit from welfare benefit recipients in the municipality of rotterdam were exposed to various financial incentives once their benefit spell exceeded one year welfare recipients were entitled to a re employment bonus if they found a job that lasted at least 6 months however they could also be punished for noncompliance with eligibility requirements and face a sanction i e a temporary reduction of their benefits we find that the financial sticks in the form of benefit sanctions were effective in stimulating the exit from welfare while the financial carrots in the form of re employment bonuses were not copyright 2011 john wiley sons ltd

estimating the effects of a time limited earnings subsidy for welfare leavers in the self sufficiency project ssp welfare demonstration members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full time work the subsidy was available for 3 years but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment a simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an establishment incentive to find a job and leave welfare within a year of random assignment and an entitlement incentive to choose work over welfare once eligibility was established building on this insight we develop an econometric model of welfare participation that allows us to separate the two effects and estimate the impact of the earnings subsidy on welfare entry and exit rates among those who achieved eligibility the combination of the two incentives explains the time profile of the experimental impacts which peaked 15 months after random assignment and faded relatively quickly our findings suggest that about half of the peak impact of ssp was attributable to the establishment incentive despite the extra work effort generated by ssp the program had no lasting impact on wages and little or no long run effect on welfare participation

family welfare cultures strong intergenerational correlations in various types of welfare use have fuelled a long standing debate over whether welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation some claim a causal relationship in welfare receipt across generations has created a culture in which welfare use reinforces itself through the family others argue the determinants of poverty or poor health are correlated across generations so that children s welfare participation is associated with but not caused by parental welfare receipt however there is little empirical evidence to sort out these claims in this paper we investigate the existence and importance of family welfare cultures in the context of norway s disability insurance di system to overcome the challenge of correlated unobservables across generations we take advantage of random assignment of judges to di applicants whose cases are initially denied some appeal judges are systematically more lenient which leads to random variation in the probability a parent will be allowed di using this exogenous variation we find strong evidence that welfare receipt in one generation causes welfare participation in the next generation when a parent is allowed di their adult child s participation over the next five years increases by 6 percentage points this effect grows over time rising to 12 percentage points after ten years while these findings are specific to our setting they serve to highlight that welfare reforms can have long lasting effects on program participation since any original effect on the current generation could be reinforced by changing the participation behavior of their children as well the detailed nature of our data allows us to compare the intergenerational transmission with spillover effects in other networks and to explore mechanisms our findings point to a special link between parents and their children with little impact due to close neighbors di participation we find suggestive evidence that what may change as a result of a parent being allowed di is their children s beliefs about the efficacy of trying to get on to the di program or their attitudes about di participation and its stigma

the long term effects of job search requirements evidence from the uk jsa reform this paper investigates long term returns from unemployment compensation exploiting variation from the uk jsa reform of 1996 which implied a major increase in job search requirements for eligibility and in the related administrative hurdle search theory predicts that such changes should raise the proportion of non claimant nonemployed with consequences on search effort and labor market attachment and lower the reservation wage of the unemployed with negative effects on post unemployment wages i test these ideas on longitudinal data from social security records llmdb using a difference in differences approach i find that individuals who start an unemployment spell soon after jsa introduction as opposed to six months earlier are 2 5 3 more likely to move from unemployment into incapacity benefits spells and 4 5 less likely to have positive earnings in the following year this latter employment effect only vanishes four years after the initial unemployment shock also annual earnings for the treated individuals are lower than for the non treated these results suggest that while tighter search requirements were successful in moving individuals off unemployment benefits they were not successful in moving them onto long lasting or better jobs with fairly long lasting unintended consequences on a number of labor market outcomes

the effect of unemployment insurance sanctions on the transition rate from unemployment to employment sanctions or punitive benefits reductions are increasingly used as a tool to enforce compliance of unemployment insurance claimants with search requirements this article analyses sanctions using a unique administrative data set of individuals who started collecting unemployment insurance in the netherlands in 1992 after correction for selectivity in the imposition of sanctions we find that sanctions substantially raise individual re employment rates

optimal use of labor market policies the role of job search assistance abstract this paper demonstrates how economic theory can be combined with state of the art empirics to make quantitative statements about optimal policy using a large administrative data set for west germany as well as nonparametric and semiparametric estimation techniques i parameterize the model proposed by pavoni and violante 2005 2007 for the optimal choice of different financial and activation measures for unemployed workers the parameterized model is used to study the role of job search assistance in optimal welfare to work programs and assess the optimality of the west german policy in the period 2000 to 2002

job search requirements effort provision and labor market outcomes abstract 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 caseworker stringency identification is ensured by the conditional random assignment of job seekers to caseworkers we find that the duration of un and non employment both decrease by 3 if the requirement increases by one monthly application when instrumenting actual applications with caseworker stringency an additionally provided monthly application decreases the length of spells by 4 in line with theory we further find that the effect of required effort decreases in the individual s voluntary effort finally the requirement level causes small negative effects on job stability reducing the duration of re employment spells by 0 3 per required application we find a zero effect on re employment wages

productivity gains from unemployment insurance this paper argues that unemployment insurance increases labor productivity by encouraging workers to seek higher productivity jobs and by encouraging rms to create those jobs we use a quantitative model to investigate whether this eect is comparable in magnitude to the standard moral hazard eects of unemployment insurance our model economy captures the behavior of the u s labor market for high school graduates quite well with unemployment insurance more generous than the current u s level unemployment would increase by a magnitude similar to the micro estimates but because the composition of jobs also changes total output and welfare would increase as well

juvenile incarceration human capital and future crime evidence from randomly assigned judges over 130 000 juveniles are detained in the united states each year with 70 000 in detention on any given day yet little is known about whether such a penalty deters future crime or interrupts social and human capital formation in a way that increases the likelihood of later criminal behavior this article uses the incarceration tendency of randomly assigned judges as an instrumental variable to estimate causal effects of juvenile incarceration on high school completion and adult recidivism estimates based on over 35 000 juvenile offenders over a 10 year period from a large urban county in the united states suggest that juvenile incarceration results in substantially lower high school completion rates and higher adult incarceration rates including for violent crimes in an attempt to understand the large effects we found that incarceration for this population could be very disruptive greatly reducing the likelihood of ever returning to school and for those who do return significantly increasing the likelihood of being classified as having an emotional or behavioral disorder jel codes k140 i210

does the public employment service affect search effort and outcomes in this paper we examine the disincentive effects of the public employment service on the search effort of unemployed workers and on their exit rate from unemployment for that purpose we specify a structural search model with fixed and variable costs of search in which unemployed workers select their optimal search intensity given the exogenous arrival rate of job contacts coming from the public employment agency because the theoretical effect of an increase in this exogenous job contact arrival rate on the structural exit rate from unemployment is ambiguous we estimate this model using individual unemployment duration data our results show that the exit rate from unemployment increases with the arrival rate of job contacts obtained by the public employment service especially for low educated and low skilled workers they also show that the search effort is more costly for low educated women and low skilled adult unemployed workers this last result suggests that a public employment agency that matches searchers and employers is beneficial in the sense that it saves searchers in terms of search costs they would otherwise bear

an oligopolistic model of an integrated market for energy and spinning reserve in this paper a model for oligopolistic competition in electricity markets is presented most previous proposed models have been static and focused only on the energy market incentives for strategic behavior in contrast in this paper a multiperiod market for energy and spinning reserve sr is considered by including such factors the competition among participants is modeled with more realism competition in the energy market is modeled by means of conjectured supply functions while conjectured reserve price response functions are used to consider the generators ability to alter the sr prices the resulting equilibrium problem is modeled in terms of complementarity conditions based upon a complementarity model the opportunity cost between the energy and sr markets is derived for oligopolistic markets the proposed model is illustrated by a six node network using a dc approximation

the effects of extended unemployment insurance over the business cycle evidence from regression discontinuity estimates over 20 years one goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance ui in recessions is to increase ui coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells although it is a common concern that such extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard to obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of ui in booms and recessions this article exploits the fact that in germany potential ui benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle we implement a regression discontinuity design separately for 20 years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle we find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional ui benefits are at best somewhat declining in recessions yet the ui exhaustion rate and therefore the additional coverage provided by ui extensions rises substantially during a downturn the ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by ui extensions hence our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of ui extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms using a model of job search with liquidity constraints we also find that in the absence of market wide effects the net social benefits from ui extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of ui durations or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard copyright 2012 oxford university press

does job search monitoring intensity affect unemployment evidence from northern ireland because unemployment benefit reforms typically package together a number of changes few existing evaluations have been able to isolate the effects of changes in job search monitoring intensity on benefit recipient stocks or flows those few studies that do so draw mixed conclusions this paper provides new estimates of monitoring impacts by exploiting plausibly exogenous periods where search monitoring has been temporarily withdrawn with the regime otherwise unchanged during a series of benefit office refurbishments in northern ireland as we would expect from search theory withdrawal of monitoring significantly increases the stock of unemployment benefit recipients via reduced outflows

the internationalisation of public welfare policy with increasing globalisation of knowledge there are increased opportunities to learn from the experience of policy interventions elsewhere this paper presents evidence on the extent of international convergence in public policy with particular focus on labour welfare savings and retirement policy questions addressed in this framework include to what extent is policy diffusion or convergence a real and relevant phenomenon what role have economists played in the transfer of policy across national domains has policy transfer led to better public policy are there any practical limitations to policy convergence

in search of workers real effort reciprocity a field and a laboratory experiment we present a field experiment to assess the effect of own and peer wage variations on actual work effort of employees with hourly wages work effort neither reacts to an increase of the own wage nor to a positive or negative peer comparison this result seems at odds with numerous laboratory experiments that show a clear own wage sensitivity on effort in an additional real effort laboratory experiment we show that explicit cost and surplus information that enables an exact calculation of an employer s surplus from the work contract is a crucial prerequisite for a positive wage effort relation this demonstrates that an employee s reciprocity requires a clear assessment of the surplus at stake jel c91 c92 j41

estimating the effect of counseling and monitoring the unemployed using a job search model this paper examines the impact of the counseling and monitoring program for the unemployed with particular reference to their job finding rate application intensity and matching probability the effectiveness of counseling and monitoring is measured by using a job search model in which the job finding rate is equal to the product of the application intensity and the matching probability counseling and monitoring is an intensive job search assistance program designed to help unemployed people receiving unemployment benefits to find a job as quickly as possible the empirical analysis is based on data from a social experiment a sample of the inflow into unemployment was randomly assigned to a treatment and a control group the empirical results based on formal reduced form models show that counseling and monitoring does reduce the time taken to find a job because people participating in the program make more applications than those who are not participating although no differences are found in matching probabilities

experimental evidence on the effects of early meetings and activation we analyze the effects of four randomized social experiments involving early and intensive active labour market policy conducted in denmark in 2008 the experiments entailed different combinations of early and intensive treatment in terms of meetings and active labour market programmes we find that frequent meetings between newly unemployed workers and case workers can increase employment rates over the next two years by up to 10 weeks the effects continue to grow over the whole 4 year horizon studied for men we find evidence of a threat effect of having to participate in early active labour market programmes while no such effect is found for women we conduct a cost benefit analysis of each ofthe four experiments and find that meetings yield the largest net benefits

public employment agencies and unemployment spells reconciling the experimental and nonexperimental evidence econometric evidence strongly suggests that unemployed job seekers who use the services of a public employment agency pea have longer unemployment spells than those choosing alternative search methods yet in some well designed u s experiments increased use of pea services has been associated with faster transitions intojobs the author argues that the nonexperimental studies may be biased toward finding a positive relationship between unemployment spell duration and pea use because they ignore the possibility that peas are chosen by manyjobseekers only after other search methods have been tried unsuccessfully and a period of unemployment has elapsed an analysis of u k survey data with information on the timing of pea use in 1987 88 supports that hypothesis

gaming based reserve constraint penalty factor analysis to ensure secure real time power system operations the system operator must schedule sufficient resources to meet energy demand and operating reserve requirements simultaneously under a joint real time energy reserve market regime a dominant market participant can exercise pricing power by withholding reserve capability or by marking up energy offers this paper examines the short term impact of the choice of reserve price cap on participant behavior and market outcomes a stackelberg game is utilized to analyze the strategic bidding behaviors of the dominant participants assuming a range of reserve price caps and market conditions the market participants play the role of the leaders while the independent system operator is treated as a follower the proposed model is applied to the new england electricity market the computed solutions show that although the reserve price cap is unable to eliminate physical withholding behaviors it disciplines the participants and limits incentives to withhold economically also it limits prices to a reasonable level during reserve shortage events when only supply side market power mitigation options are available absent any transmission improvements or effective demand response participation the reserve price cap remains an effective tool to mitigate the impact of the exercise of supplier market power

is the threat of reemployment services more effective than the services themselves evidence from random assignment in the ui system we examine the effect of the worker profiling and reemployment services system this program profiles unemployment insurance ui claimants to determine their probability of benefit exhaustion and then provides mandatory employment and training services to claimants with high predicted probabilities using a unique experimental design we estimate that the program reduces mean weeks of ui benefit receipt by about 2 2 weeks reduces mean ui benefits received by about 143 ana increases subsequent earnings by over 1 050 most of the effect results from a sharp increase in early ui exits in the treatment group relative to the control group jel j650

the effect of benefit sanctions on the duration of unemployment this paper investigates the effectiveness of unemployment benefit sanctions in reducing unemployment duration swiss data on benefit sanctions allow us to separate the effect of a warning that a person is not complying with eligibility requirements from the effect of the actual enforcement of a benefit sanction moreover public employment services are given substantial leeway in setting the monitoring intensity results indicate that both warning and enforcement have a positive effect on the exit rate out of unemployment and that increasing the monitoring intensity reduces the duration of unemployment of the nonsanctioned jel j64 j65 j68

monitoring job offer decisions punishments exit to work and job quality unemployment insurance systems include the monitoring of unemployed workers and punitive sanctions if job search requirements are violated we analyze the causal effect of sanctions on the ensuing job quality notably on wages and occupational level we use swedish data and estimate duration models dealing with selection on unobservables we also develop a theoretical job search model that monitors job offer rejection versus job search effort the empirical results show that after a sanction the wage rate is lower and individuals move more often to a part time job and a lower occupational level incurring human capital losses

the provision of incentives in firms i ncentives are the essence of economics despite many wide ranging claims about their supposed importance there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers the purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm s interest this literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers these include piece rates options discretionary bonuses promotions profit sharing efficiency wages deferred compensation and so on my objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation where possible i will address the literature from two perspectives first an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance accordingly i consider whether agents behave in this way and whether these responses are always in the firm s interest second i address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind in other words do contracts look like the predictions of the theory incentives are provided to workers

estimating equilibrium effects of job search assistance identifying policy relevant treatment effects from randomized experiments requires the absence of spillovers between participants and nonparticipants sutva or variation in observed treatment levels we find that sutva is violated for a danish activation program for unemployed workers using a difference in differences model we show that nonparticipants in the experiment regions find jobs more slowly after the introduction of the program than workers

more on the choice between public and private production of a publicly funded service overall the empirical findings we reported in our 1987 article are strongly suggestive of the importance of nonmonetary considerations in the production mode choice nonetheless professor pack is quite correct to note that our conclusion 1987 225 226 overstates the evidence we presented for the primacy of nonmonetary factors in the production mode choice when her full model is considered regarding the full model despite the statistically significant findings for some demographic variables a formal theoretical model of their effects on the production mode choice is lacking notwithstanding pack s comments concerning scale economies we are persuaded that the theoretic void regarding the effects of demographic variables on the production mode choice still exists

unemployment duration and the restart effect some experimental evidence in this paper we analyse the effect of ihe restart programme in the united kingdom this programme consisis of an interview of tbe long term unemployed to counsel them on effective job search failure to attend the interview carries the threat of the cessation of unemployment benefits the results using experimental data indicate that the programme has a significant effect of reducing unemployment duration estimation of an independent competing risks model distinguishing between exits from unemployment to a job a training placement or to signing off unemployment benefit shows that the channels through which restart works differs according to exit type

optimal unemployment insurance this paper considers the design of an optimal unemployment insurance system the problem is modeled as a repeated principalagent problem involving a risk averse agent the unemployed worker and a risk neutral principal which cannot monitor the agent s search effort the optimal long term contract subject to the associated incentive constraints is characterized this contract involves a replacement ratio that decreases throughout the unemployment spell and a wage tax after reemployment that under some mild regularity conditions increases with the lenght of the unemployment spell some numerical results are presented that suggest that the gains from switching to this optimal unemployment insurance scheme could be quite large the performance of this optimal contract is also compared to alternative liquidity provision mechanisms

a bilevel approach to operational decision making of a distribution company in competitive environments this paper presents a model for operational decision making of a distribution company disco with distributed generation dg and interruptible loads il in a competitive market the disco objective modeled through the upper level problem is to minimize the cost of market purchases and dg unit dispatch while taking into account the responses of the other discos this upper level problem is constrained by a lower level market clearing problem whose objective corresponds to maximization of social welfare such a setting results in a multi disco equilibrium problem formulated as an equilibrium problem with equilibrium constraints epec by combining the optimality conditions of all upper level problems using a nonlinear approach the epec problem is reformulated as a single nonlinear optimization model which is simultaneously solved for all discos the proposed approach is applied to an ac model of a power system to account for voltage and reactive power constraints of the transmission and distribution networks numerical examples based on two test systems are presented to illustrate the application of the proposed method

effects of unemployment insurance work search requirements the maryland experiment this paper describes findings from a 1994 experimental evaluation of alternative work search requirements in the unemployment insurance ui program requiring additional employer contacts or verification of contacts reduced ui receipt by one week and 115 per claimant because these additional requirements did not entail additional re employment services the ui spell reduction can be attributed to increased non monetary costs for remaining on ui a job search workshop requirement reduced ui receipt by half a week and 75 per claimant and additional results indicate that the effects were due to increased costs of continued ui receipt rather than to enhanced job search productivity these treatments did not affect employment or earnings implying that reduced ui duration led to more intensive job search rather than a reduction in the reservation wage in contrast elimination of the employer contact requirement increased ui receipt and post ui earnings suggesting that delayed exit from ui improved job matches he unemployment insurance ui program is designed to provide temporary income support to involuntarily unemployed individuals while they search for work although the ui program provides only temporary income support for the involuntarily unemployed it can reduce the incentive to seek employment because ui benefits reduce the cost of being unemployed resulting in an increase in the reservation wage and longer spells of unemployment to partially offset the negative impact ui benefits have onjob search state ui programs typically impose work search requirements for continued benefit receipt

public versus private economic activity a new look at school bus transportation thomas borcherding 1977 in commenting on the public versus private literature offered the generalization that removal of an activity from the private to the public sector will double its unit costs of production the results of this paper obviously are not consistent with borcherding s rule of two generalization at the same time however the 12 cost per mile differential in favor of private ownership indicated by the results for the overall sample is not a trivial sum in absolute terms the cost per mile differences in favor of private buses contained in the five trip groups are not trivial either nor is the direct evidence from the 82 joint systems in attempting to assess the results much depends on the perspective against which they are judged

measuring labor market frictions a cross country comparison in this paper we define and estimate measures of labor market frictions using data on job durations we compare different estimation methods and different types of data we propose and apply an unconditional inference method that can be applied to aggregate duration data it does not require wage data it is invariant to the way in which wages are determined and it allows workers to care about other job characteristics the empirical analysis focuses on france but we perform separate analyses for the united states of america the united kingdom germany and the netherlands we quantify the monopsony power due to search frictions and we examine the policy effects of the minimum wage unemployment benefits and search frictions jel j63 j64

optimal unemployment insurance with monitoring and sanctions this article analyses the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable we examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is deemed insufficient we find that introducing monitoring and sanctions represents a welfare improvement for reasonable estimates of monitoring costs this conclusion holds both relative to a system featuring indefinite payments of benefits and a system with a time limit on unemployment benefit receipt

can helping the sick hurt the able incentives information and disruption in a welfare reform the uk jobcentre plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients relative to unemployment insurance recipients into jobs in the long run the policy raised exits off diasability benefits by 10 and left unemployment outflows roughly unchanged consistent with i beneficial effects of reorganising welfare offices for both groups and ii a shift in bureaucrats efforts towards getting disability benefit recipients into jobs relative to those on unemployment benefit the policy accounted for about 30 of the decline in the aggregate disability rolls between 2003 and 2008 in the short run however we detect a reduction in unemployment exits and no effect on disability exits suggesting important initial disruption effects from the big reorganisation this highlights the difficulty of welfare reform as policymakers may focus on the short run political costs rather than the long run economic benefits

structural empirical evaluation of job search monitoring to evaluate search effort monitoring of unemployed workers it is important to take account of post unemployment wages and job to job mobility we structurally estimate a model with search channels using a controlled trial in which monitoring is randomized the data include registers and survey data on search behavior we find that the opportunity to move to better paid jobs in employment reduces the extent to which monitoring induces substitution toward formal search channels in unemployment job mobility compensates for adverse long run effects of monitoring on wages we examine counterfactual policies against moral hazard like reemployment bonuses and changes of the benefits path

contracting out by the public sector theory evidence prospects unlike privatization contracting out or simply contracting does not generally involve the sale of publicly owned assets yet it has been widely used as a mechanism for reform of public sector service provision contracting introduces ex ante competition competition for the market through competitive tendering this article examines both the theory and evidence of contracting by the public sector it considers the theoretical conditions such as contractual incompleteness and the ownership of physical assets which may impede efficient contracting it also reviews the international evidence which suggests that savings in the order of 20 percent are achievable without sacrificing the quality of service provided in the uk savings of between 240m pounds and 280m pounds have been estimated for contracts let at the central government level substantial savings have also been generated by contracting at the local government level copyright 1997 by oxford university press

improving incentives in unemployment insurance a review of recent research abstract this paper provides a review of the recent literature on how incentives in unemployment insurance can be improved we are particularly concerned with three instruments i e the duration of benefit payments or more generally the time sequencing of benefits monitoring in conjunction with sanctions and workfare our reading of the theoretical literature is that the case for imposing a penalty on less active job search is fairly solid a growing number of empirical studies including randomized experiments are in line with this conclusion