the impact of unemployment insurance on job search evidence from google search data job search is a key choice variable in theories of labor markets but is difficult to measure directly we develop a job search activity index based on google search data the google job search index gjsi we validate the gjsi with both survey and web based measures of job search unlike those measures the gjsi is high frequency geographically precise and available in real time we demonstrate the gjsi s utility by using it to study the effects of unemployment insurance policy changes between 2008 and 2014 we find no evidence of an economically meaningful effect of these changes on aggregate search

unemployment insurance and the rate of re employment of displaced workers the rate of transition from unemployment to re employment for a sample of displaced workers is estimated using a semiparametric specification which allows the effects of unemployment insurance benefits to vary over time three results which would be missed by more restrictive specifications demonstrate the value of this approach 1 the effects of ui benefits decline and eventually disappear as the date of expiration approaches 2 expiration of ui benefits are an inadequate explanation of the spikes commonly observed in nonparametric sample hazard rates for re employment 3 ui benefits do not significantly affect the rate at which a displaced worker becomes re employed in his or her previous industry but reduce the rate for transitions to other industries copyright 1991 by mit press

how do different entitlements to unemployment benefits affect the transitions from unemployment into employment abstract in portugal duration of benefits is exclusively age determined while replacement rates are essentially uniform we exploit differences in potential maximum duration of benefits for nearly matched pairs of individuals to determine the effects of benefit duration on job finding

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

job search and unemployment insurance new evidence from time use data article i nfo this paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the u s modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities the major findings are 1 the average u s unemployed worker devotes about 41 min to job search on weekdays which is substantially more than their european counterparts 2 workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker 3 across the 50 states and d c job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits with an elasticity between 1 6 and 2 2 4 job search intensity for those eligible for unemployment insurance ui increases prior to benefit exhaustion and 5 time devoted to job search is fairly constant regardless of unemployment duration for those who are ineligible for ui

the impact of the potential duration of unemployment benefits on the duration of unemployment abstract this paper examines the impact of the potential duration of unemployment insurance ui benefits on unemployment in the united states first we use a large sample of household heads to examine differences in the unemployment spell distributions of ui recipients and nonrecipients sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for ui recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients second our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of ui recipients by 0 16 to 0 20 weeks

unemployment insurance recall expectations and unemployment outcomes this paper empirically examines the importance of explicitly accounting for the layoff rehire process in the analysis of unemployment outcomes in the united states we find that the spells of individuals who initially expect to be recalled account for much more of the unemployment of unemployment insurance ui recipients than do spells actually ending in recall our results indicate that the recall and new job escape rates from unemployment have quite different time patterns and are often affected in opposite ways by explanatory variables we also find that the probability of leaving unemployment both through recalls and new job finding increases greatly around the time that ui benefits lapse over the past fifteen years many studies have empirically analyzed the determinants of individual unemployment spell durations in the united states much of this literature has used a job search framework in which the unemployed are viewed as permanently displaced workers who are unattached to jobs the possibility of recall to a former job a process not requiring search has been omitted from explicit consideration in the majority of these studies 2 an explicit treatment of the layoff rehire process is necessary for a proper understanding of the determinants of unemployment durations and of the impacts of unemployment policies in the united states for at least three reasons first temporary layoffs in which workers are often rehired by their original employers are a quantitatively quite important feature of the u s labor market 3 second expectations concerning the likelihood of recall are likely to affect the responses of employers and unemployed workers to labor market interventions such as reemployment bonuses and subsidies

rethinking social insurance economics 1 social insurance programs have become the most important the most expensive and often the most controversial aspect of government domestic policy not only in the united states but also in many other countries including developing and industrialized nations in the united states these programs include social security retirement disability and survivor insurance unemployment insurance and medicare insurance for those age 65 and older together these programs accounted for 37 percent of federal government spending and more than 7 percent of gdp in 2003 these ratios have increased rapidly in the past and are projected to increase even faster in the future because of the more rapid aging of the population i will discuss how the major forms of social

search and nonwage job characteristics this paper quantifies the importance of nonwage job characteristics to workers by estimating a structural on the job search model the model generalizes the standard search framework by allowing workers to search for jobs based on both wages and job specific nonwage utility flows within the structure of the search model data on accepted wages and wage changes at job transitions identify the importance of nonwage utility through revealed preference the estimates reveal that utility from nonwage job characteristics plays an important role in determining job mobility the value of jobs to workers and the gains from job search

short run pricing strategies to increase corporate average fuel economy short run pricing strategies to increase corporate average fuel economy i introduction in 1974 the average fuel efficiency of new automobiles sold in the united states reached a low of 14 2 miles per gallon mpg close on the heels of the arab opec oil embargo of 1973 74 and the ensuing petroleum price shocks congress passed the 1975 energy policy and conservation act the act required each manufacturer to meet sales weighted corporate average fuel economy cafe standards beginning with 18 mpg in 1978 and gradually increasing each year to 27 5 mpg in 1985 figure 1 the expressed purpose of the cafe standards was to stimulate the development of technology to improve fuel efficiency the possibility of raising the relative prices of the least energy efficient models as a strategy to meet the standards was considered but only as a last resort 1 although there continues to be intense debate as to whether fuel price increases or the cafe regulations drove the fuel economy improvements of the 1970s and 80s several studies agree that improvements in automotive engineering and design rather than pricing strategies played an overwhelmingly dominant role 2 no empirical evidence supports the effectiveness of using pricing strategies to increase the overall level of automotive fuel economy every year since 1985 automobile manufacturers have successfully petitioned the national highway traffic safety administration which determines the level of the cafe standard to reduce the target from 27 5 to 26 mpg in 1986 88 and 26 5 mpg in 1989 in each case at least one manufacturer argued that it would be unable to meet the original target with its planned product offerings and would have to resort to other strategies that would result in unacceptable economic costs this paper explores a method of estimating the costs of achieving fuel economy goals when pricing strategies are used to alter the distribution of sales the method employs the closed form equation for consumers surplus derived from the multinational logit model of discrete choice discussed by mcfadden 1973 and assumes that manufacturers must bear the full cost of meeting the fuel economy target the estimated cost represents an upper bound on the losses firms would incur by setting prices to minimize loss of profit using econometric estimates of the sensitivity of vehicle choice to vehicle price together with market shares and fuel efficiencies for 1986 i estimate the costs of short term improvements in average fuel economy using pricing strategies for general motors ford and chrysler minor adjustments of up to 1 mpg cost 1 2 percent of the price of a 10 000 car for improvements of 2 mpg or more however pricing strategies become a costly way to improve fuel economy the technique also estimates the market shares for each car line that correspond to the pricing solution it thereby identifies which car lines would be most affected the technique produces precise price changes and market shares for each car line readers should not place too much weight on the apparent precision but should consider the estimates as an approximation the usefulness of which lies in measuring the difficulty of meeting fuel economy targets via pricing strategies alone one can compare the size of these estimates to the fines for failing to meet the standards 50 per mpg per car or to typical manufacturer rebates to stimulate sales often 100 to 2 000 per car ii a formulation of the pricing problem faced with the cafe requirements a firm can respond with engineering and design improvements or by raising the prices of less efficient models and lowering the prices of those that exceed the standard technological improvements generally require a lead time of three to five years very large fluctuations in fuel prices have occurred in far shorter perids figure 1 creating the risk that a manufacturer s product offering could be out of step with the market

benefit duration unemployment duration and job match quality a regression discontinuity approach summary we use a sharp discontinuity in the maximum duration of benefit entitlement to identify the effect of extended benefit duration on unemployment duration and post unemployment outcomes employment stability and re employment wages we address dynamic selection which may arise even under an initially random assignment to treatment estimating a bivariate discrete time hazard model jointly with a wage equation and correlated unobservables owing to the non stationarity of job search behavior we find heterogeneous effects of extended benefit duration on the re employment hazard and on job match quality our results suggest that the unemployed who find a job close to and after benefit exhaustion experience less stable employment patterns and receive lower re employment wages compared to their counterparts who receive extended benefits and exit unemployment in the same period these results are found to be significant for men but not for women copyright 2012 john wiley sons ltd

the spike at benefit exhaustion leaving the unemployment system or starting a new job in this paper we review the literature on the spike in unemployment exit rates around benefit exhaustion and present new evidence based on administrative data for a large sample of job losers in austria we find that the way unemployment spells are measured has a large effect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion both in existing studies and in our austrian data spikes are typically much smaller when spell length is defined by the time to next job than when it is defined by the time spent on the unemployment system in austria the exit rate from registered unemployment rises by over 200 at the expiration of benefits while the hazard rate of re employment rises by only 20 the difference between the two measures arises because many individuals leave the unemployment register immediately after their benefits expire without returning to work the modest spike in re employment rates implies that most job seekers do not wait until their ui benefits are exhausted to return to work fewer than 1 of jobless spells have an ending date that is manipulated to coincide with the expiration of ui benefits this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

when the going gets tough financial incentives duration of unemployment and job match quality in the aftermath of the great recession the spanish government reduced the replacement rate rr from 60 percent to 50 percent after 180 days of unemployment for all spells beginning on or after july 15 2012 using social security data and a differences in differences approach we find that reducing the rr by ten percentage points or 17 percent increases workers odds of finding a job by 41 percent relative to similar workers not affected by the reform to put it differently the reform reduced the mean expected unemployment duration by 5 7 weeks or 14 percent implying an elasticity of 0 86 a regression discontinuity approach indicates that the reform increased the job finding rate by 26 percent we find strong behavioral effects as the reform reduced the expected unemployment duration right from the beginning of the unemployment spell while the reform had no effect on wages it did not decrease other measures of post displacement job match quality after 15 months the reform decreased unemployment insurance expenditures by 16 percent about one half of which are explained by job seekers behavioral changes

how changes in financial incentives affect the duration of unemployment this paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance the benefit replacement rate rr and the potential benefit duration pbd affect the duration of unemployment to identify such an effect we exploit a policy change introduced in 1989 by the austrian government which affected various unemployed workers differently a first group experienced an increase in rr a second group experienced an extension of pbd a third group experienced both a higher rr and a longer pbd and a fourth group experienced no change in the policy parameters we find that unemployed workers react to the disincentives by an increase in unemployment duration and our empirical results are consistent with the predictions of job search theory we use our parameter estimates to split up the total costs to unemployment insurance funds into costs due to changes in the unemployment insurance system with unchanged behaviour and costs due to behavioural responses of unemployed workers our results indicate that costs due to behavioural responses are substantial

unemployment insurance and reservation wages evidence from administrative data although the reservation wage plays a central role in job search models empirical evidence on the determinants of reservation wages including key policy variables such as unemployment insurance ui is scarce in france unemployed people must declare their reservation wage to the public employment service when they register to claim ui benefits we take advantage of these rich french administrative data and of a reform of ui rules to estimate the effect of the potential benefit duration pbd on reservation wages and on other dimensions of job selectivity using a difference in difference strategy we cannot reject that the elasticity of the reservation wage with respect to pbd is zero our results are precise and we can rule out elasticities larger than 0 006 furthermore we do not find any significant effects of pbd on the desired number of hours duration of labor contract and commuting time distance the estimated elasticity of actual benefit duration with respect to pbd of 0 3 is in line with the consensus in the literature exploiting a regression discontinuity design as an alternative identification strategy we find similar results

on the externality free shapley shubik index abstract we address the problem of extending the shapley shubik index to the class of simple games with externalities introduced in alonso meijide et al 2017 on the one hand we provide bounds for any efficient symmetric and monotonic power index on the other hand we characterize the restriction of the externality free value of de clippel and serrano 2008 to the class of games under study by adapting well known properties

re employment probabilities of unemployment benefit recipients this article studies transitions out of unemployment for benefit recipients in spain we analyse the duration of unemployment distinguishing between spells that end in recall workers returning to the previous employer and spells that end in exit to a new job this distinction allows us to find that the recall hazard rate increases around the time of exhaustion of benefits however this happens only for workers receiving unemployment insurance ui because we are unable to replicate this result for workers receiving unemployment assistance ua we believe the finding lends support to the hypothesis that in spain firms and workers make a strategic use of ui

unemployment insurance and unemployment spells this paper tests the effects of the level and length of unemployment insurance benefits on unemployment durations the paper particularly studies individual behavior during the weeks just prior to when benefits lapse higher unemployment insurance benefits are found to have a strong negative effect on the probability of leaving unemployment however the probability of leaving unemployment rises dramatically just prior to when benefits lapse individual data are used with accurate information of spell durations and the level and length of benefits the semiparametric estimation techniques used in the paper yield more plausible estimates than conventional approaches and provide useful diagnostics copyright 1990 by the econometric society

active labor market policy evaluations a meta analysis this article presents a meta analysis of recent microeconometric evaluations of active labour market policies we categorise 199 programme impacts from 97 studies conducted between 1995 and 2007 job search assistance programmes yield relatively favourable programme impacts whereas public sector employment programmes are less effective training programmes are associated with positive medium term impacts although in the short term they often appear ineffective we also find that the outcome variable used to measure programme impact matters but neither the publication status of a study nor the use of a randomised design is related to the sign or significance of the programme estimate

a general formula for the optimal level of social insurance in an influential paper baily 1978 showed that the optimal level of unemployment insurance ui in a stylized static model depends on only three parameters risk aversion the consumption smoothing benefit of ui and the elasticity of unemployment durations with respect to the benefit rate this paper examines the key economic assumptions under which these parameters determine the optimal level of social insurance i show that a baily type expression with an adjustment for precautionary saving motives holds in a general class of dynamic models subject to weak regularity conditions for example the simple reduced form formula derived here applies with arbitrary borrowing constraints durable consumption goods private insurance arrangements and search and leisure benefits of unemployment

cash on hand and competing models of intertemporal behavior new evidence from the labor market this paper presents new tests of the permanent income hypothesis and other widely used models of household behavior using data from the labor market we estimate the excess sensitivity of job search behavior to cash on hand using sharp discontinuities in eligibility for severance pay and extended unemployment insurance ui benefits in austria analyzing data for over one half million job losers we obtain three empirical results 1 a lump sum severance payment equal to two months of earnings reduces the job finding rate by 8 12 on average 2 an extension of the potential duration of ui benefits from 20 weeks to 30 weeks similarly lowers job finding rates in the first 20 weeks of search by 5 9 and 3 increases in the duration of search induced by the two programs have little or no effect on subsequent job match quality using a search theoretic model we show that estimates of the relative effect of severance pay and extended benefits can be used to calibrate and test a wide set of intertemporal models our estimates of this ratio are inconsistent with the predictions of a simple permanent income model as well as naive rule of thumb behavior the representative job searcher in our data is 70 of the way between the permanent income benchmark and credit constrained behavior in terms of sensitivity to cash on hand

how shortening the potential duration of unemployment benefits affects the duration of unemployment evidence from a natural experiment in this article we investigate the disincentive effects of shortening the potential duration of unemployment insurance ui benefits we identify these disincentive effects by exploiting changes in slovenia s unemployment insurance system a natural experiment that involved substantial reductions in the potential duration of benefits for four groups of workers plus no change in benefits for another group which served as a natural control we find that the change had a positive effect on the exit rate from unemployment to new jobs and other options for unemployment spells of various lengths and for several categories of unemployed workers

does extending unemployment benefits improve job quality contrary to standard search models predictions past studies have not found a positive effect of unemployment insurance ui on reemployment wages we estimate a positive ui wage effect exploiting