extended benefits and the duration of ui spells evidence from the new jersey extended benefit program abstract this paper examines the impact on the duration of unemployment insurance receipt of a politically motivated program that offered 13 weeks of extended benefits for 6 months in 1996 using state level data and individual administrative records from before during and after the program we find that it raised the fraction of claimants who exhausted their regular benefits by 1 3 percentage points had the program run long enough to affect claimants from the first day of their spell the fraction exhausting would have risen by 7 percentage points and the average recipient would have collected regular benefits for one extra week

kick starting diffusion explaining the varying frequency of preferential trade agreements environmental provisions by their initial conditions most recent preferential trade agreements ptas include environmental provisions while a number of these environmental provisions remain rare and are incorporated in just a few ptas others are widely popular and are duplicated in more than 100 ptas we still lack a convincing explanation for this varying frequency while the diffusion literature typically tries to explain how diffusion occurs we investigate why certain provisions diffuse more often than others we hypothesise that the initial conditions under which provisions first emerge determine the scope of their diffusion our results support this hypothesis and indicate that provisions originating from intercontinental agreements diffuse more often than others at the same time provisions first designed by economically powerful or environmentally credible countries are not related to more frequent occurrences of diffusion these findings are of interest for the literatures on international institutions design interaction and diffusion

the macro effects of unemployment benefit extensions a measurement error approach by how much does an extension of unemployment benefits affect macroeconomic outcomes such as unemployment answering this question is challenging because u s law extends benefits for states experiencing high unemployment we use data revisions to decompose the variation in the duration of benefits into the part coming from actual differences in economic conditions and the part coming from measurement error in the real time data used to determine benefit extensions using only the variation coming from measurement error we find that benefit extensions have a limited influence on state level macroeconomic outcomes we apply our estimates to the increase in the duration of benefits during the great recession and find that they increased the unemployment rate by at most 0 3 percentage point

on the importance of the participation margin for labor market fluctuations abstract conventional analyses of labor market fluctuations ascribe a minor role to labor force participation we show by contrast that flows based analyses imply that the participation margin accounts for around one third of unemployment fluctuations a novel stock flow apparatus establishes these facts delivering three further contributions first the role of the participation margin appears robust to adjustments for spurious transitions induced by reporting error second conventional stocks based analyses are subject to a stock flow fallacy neglecting offsetting forces of worker flows on the participation rate third increases in labor force attachment among the unemployed during recessions are a leading explanation for the role of the participation margin

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 benefits and work incentives the us labour market in the great recession in the midst of sharply rising long term unemployment a series of unemployment benefit ub eligibility extensions raised the regular 26 week limit to as many as 99 weeks in some states in response leading economists have invoked the laws of economics to warn that the extensions may be responsible for much of the current unemployment crisis this prediction follows directly from a neoclassical vision in which jobs are taken only to generate the income necessary for desired levels of consumption and leisure workers can price themselves into a job by lowering wage demands and benefit eligibility rules are not effectively enforced so any income replacement must reduce work incentives and increase unemployment in contrast in a keynesian institutionalist vision there is job rationing in economic downturns worker identities are often closely linked to work there is recognition of long run scarring effects of extended unemployment and ub work rules are enforced so even generous income replacement is not likely to produce much voluntary unemployment especially in recessions this paper reviews the evidence on the effects of the ub extensions of 2008 9 the case for the orthodox prediction has relied heavily on extrapolating from pre great recession findings particularly through the use of selected spike at benefit exhaustion results from the early 1980s we conclude that the more recent spike evidence the recent shifts in the beveridge curve and the labour flows data unemployment to employment evidence offer little support for the orthodox disincentive view of the current unemployment crisis in the us if ub generosity has increased unemployment it has done so more by keeping workers attached to the labour market than by reducing the incentive to work copyright 2011 oxford university press

business cycles in the equilibrium model of labor market search and self insurance i introduce risk aversion labor leisure choice capital individual productivity shocks and market incompleteness to the standard model of labor search and matching and investigate the model s cyclical properties i find that the model can generate the observed large volatility of unemployment and vacancies with a reasonable replacement rate of unemployment insurance benefits of 64 labor leisure choice plays a crucial role through additional utility from leisure when unemployed and further amplification from adjustments of hours worked on the other hand the borrowing constraint or individual productivity shocks do not significantly affect the cyclical properties of unemployment and vacancies

transitions in the german labor market structure and crisis abstract since the so called hartz iv reforms around 2005 and during the global crisis of 2008 2009 the german labor market featured mainly declining unemployment rates we develop a search and matching model with heterogeneous skills to explore the role of structural and cyclical policies for this performance calibrating unemployment benefits to approximate legislation before and after the reforms we find a large reduction in unemployment and its duration with the transition concluding after about three years during the crisis the extended use of short time labor subsidies that prevent jobs from being destroyed is likely to have prevented strong increases in unemployment

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

reforms with a female face gender liberalization and economic policy in andhra pradesh india summary the state of andhra pradesh india provides a case study of a liberalization program with an emphasis on women s empowerment based on the state budget data and fieldwork data from two villages this paper investigates the content of this policy regime to argue that women s empowerment policies were ultimately constrained by the policy context of liberalization the state lowered shares of expenditure upon social reproduction and the substantive content of women s empowerment policy was reduced to a thrift and micro credit program fieldwork data indicate the latter lacks administrative support and relies upon the expenditure of time and resources by participants themselves re emphasizing class and caste inequalities among women and undermining the broader project of empowerment

moral hazard vs liquidity and optimal unemployment insurance this paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance ui benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from ui using this evidence i show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by ui benefits is due to a liquidity effect rather than distortions on marginal incentives to search moral hazard by combining two empirical strategies first i find that increases in benefits have much larger effects on durations for liquidity constrained households second lump sum severance payments increase durations substantially among constrained households i derive a formula for the optimal benefit level that depends only on the reduced form liquidity and moral hazard elasticities the formula implies that the optimal ui benefit level exceeds 50 percent of the wage the exact identification approach to welfare analysis proposed here yields robust optimal policy results because it does not require structural estimation of primitives

the adverse effect of unemployment insurance on workers on the job effort and labor market outcomes i investigate the effect of unemployment insurance on worker on the job effort and its macroeconomic impacts the results show that a moderate increase in unemployment benefits decreases the average wage and employment duration and aggregate output and increases average layoff rate

a quantitative analysis of unemployment benefit extensions abstract extensions of unemployment insurance ui benefits have been implemented in response to the great recession this paper measures the effect of these extensions on the unemployment rate using a calibrated structural model featuring job search and consumption saving decisions skill depreciation and ui eligibility the ongoing ui benefit extensions are found to have raised the unemployment rate by 1 4 percentage points which is about 30 of the observed increase since 2007 moreover the contribution of the ui benefit extensions to the elevated unemployment rate increased during 2009 2011 while the number of vacancies recovered the successive extensions kept search intensity down

labor market policies during an epidemic abstract we study the positive and normative implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fallout from containment measures during an epidemic we incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance ui expansions and payroll subsidies in isolation payroll subsidies that preserve match capital and enable a swift economic recovery are preferred over a cost equivalent ui expansion when considered jointly however a cost equivalent optimal mix allocates 20 percent of the budget to payroll subsidies and 80 percent to ui the two policies are complementary catering to different rungs of the productivity ladder the small share of payroll subsidies is sufficient to preserve high productivity jobs but it leaves room for social assistance to workers who face inevitable job loss

business cycles unemployment insurance and the calibration of matching models this paper theoretically and empirically documents a puzzle that arises when an rbc economy with a job matching function is used to model unemployment the standard model can generate sufficiently large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment or a sufficiently small response of unemployment to labor market policies but it cannot do both variable search and separation finite ui benefit duration efficiency wages and capital all fail to resolve this puzzle however either sticky wages or match specific productivity shocks can improve the model s performance by making the firm s flow of surplus more procyclical which makes hiring more procyclical too

micro credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development who pays abstract there is a growing acknowledgement that micro credit programs have potential for equitable and sustainable development however my anthropological research on the micro credit program of the grameen bank shows that bank workers are expected to increase disbursement of loans among their members and press for high recovery rates to earn profit necessary for economic viability of the institution to ensure timely repayment in the loan centers bank workers and borrowing peers inflict an intense pressure on women clients in the study community many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules through a process of loan recycling that considerably increases the debt liability on the individual households increases tension and frustration among household members produces new forms of dominance over women and increases violence in society

unemployment insurance in a three state model of the labor market abstract the paper extends the model of krusell et al 2010 to study the welfare effects of unemployment insurance the model unemployment insurance program includes four realistic features 1 a 50 replacement rate up to a benefit cap 2 finite duration of eligibility during a jobless spell 3 limited eligibility and 4 and an imperfectly monitored job search requirement the model is parameterized to fit the size of scope of unemployment insurance in the united states removing unemployment insurance from the model leads to only a 0 1 consumption equivalent increase in average welfare simplifying assumptions about the structure of unemployment insurance such as allowing all job losers to receive benefits lead to much larger welfare effects similar to the effects found in the past literature understanding the welfare effects of unemployment insurance requires careful modeling of the structure of the program

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

occupational specificity of human capital we find that returns to occupational tenure are substantial everything else being constant 5 years of occupational tenure are associated with an increase in wages of 12 20 moreover when occupational experience is taken into account tenure with an industry or employer has relatively little importance in accounting for the wage one receives this finding is consistent with human capital being occupation specific

worker search effort as an amplification mechanism abstract it is well known that the diamond mortensen pissarides model exhibits a strong trade off between cyclical unemployment fluctuations and the size of rents to employment introducing endogenous job search effort reduces the strength of the trade off while bringing the model closer to the data ignoring worker search effort leads to a large upward bias in the elasticity of matches with respect to vacancies merging the american time use survey and the current population survey new evidence in support of procyclical search effort is presented average search effort of the unemployed is subject to cyclical composition biases

drowned by numbers stabilization properties of an eu wide unemployment insurance system the recent crisis has given rise to proposals for the creation of a european unemployment insurance system we simulate an eu wide mechanism under various scenarios varying methods of financing common or country specific contribution rates and triggers for pay outs all time or contingent clauses we analyse the impact of the system using different measures of stabilization under different fiscal multipliers a system operating during bad times periods where the increase in unemployment is large would reduce gdp growth variability but also growth correlation among member countries hence there is a trade off between stabilization and synchronization of national business cycles

does unemployment insurance crowd out home production abstract in this paper we study the interaction between self insurance and public insurance in particular we provide evidence on a negative correlation between unemployment insurance benefits and home production using the american time use survey atus and the state level unemployment insurance data of the u s the empirical results suggest that moving to a two times more generous state would decrease time spent on home production about 22 for the unemployed then we pursue a quantitative assessment of this empirical finding using a dynamic competitive equilibrium model in which households do home production as well as market production the model is able to generate the empirical facts regarding the unemployment benefits and home production the fact that unemployment insurance benefits crowd out home production is interpreted as a substitution between the two insurance mechanisms against loss of earnings during unemployment spells

the wealth of the unemployed many studies have investigated the adequacy of unemployment insurance ui benefits as a form of income replacement but few have looked at other resources with which the unemployed can finance their unemployment spells this paper focuses on one form of resources own wealth holdings the author finds that the median worker s financial assets can cover roughly two thirds of the income loss from an unemployment spell wealth holdings vary tremendously however and almost one third of workers are unable to replace even 10 of their income loss moreover predicted wealth holdings decline precipitously with realized unemployment durations both absolutely and especially relative to actual income loss this finding together with the finding that individuals who are eligible for more generous ui draw down their wealth more slowly than do others during unemployment spells suggests that ui benefit adequacy could be increased if the benefits were targeted to those with longer unemployment spells

screening by the company you keep joint liability lending and the peer selection effect we look at an economic environment where borrowers have some information about the nature of each other s projects that lenders do not we show that joint liability lending contracts similar to those used by credit cooperatives and group lending schemes will induce endogenous peer selection in the formation of groups in a way that the instrument of joint liability can be used as a screening device to exploit this local information this can improve welfare and repayment rates if standard screening instruments such as collateral are unavailable

delayed collection of unemployment insurance in recessions contrary to assumptions in the unemployment insurance ui literature this paper argues that unemployed workers do not always lose uncollected ui benefits when they start a new job instead they may postpone the collection of leftover benefits to future unemployment spells further using cross time and cross state variations in ui policies the paper finds empirical evidence that allowing unemployed workers to delay the collection of benefits increases their incentives to find a job during recessions when wages are low job separation rates are high and ui benefits are extended i quantify the effects of the policy of allowing delayed collection of benefits on aggregate unemployment by introducing endogenous search effort benefit eligibility and wage indexed benefits into a standard search and matching framework the model demonstrates how the policy increases the future value of employment even though more generous ui benefits in general reduce the net value of employment using a calibrated model i find that allowing delayed benefit collection raises the proportion of unemployed workers receiving benefits and reduces the unemployment rate during 2009 2012

mismatch shocks and unemployment during the great recession summary we investigate the macroeconomic consequences of fluctuations in the effectiveness of the labor market matching process with a focus on the great recession we conduct our analysis in the context of an estimated medium scale dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with sticky prices and equilibrium search unemployment that features a shock to the matching efficiency or mismatch shock we find that this shock is not important for unemployment fluctuations in normal times however it plays a somewhat larger role during the great recession when it contributes to raise the actual unemployment rate by around 1 3 percentage points and the natural rate by around 2 percentage points the mismatch shock is the dominant driver of the natural rate of unemployment and explains part of the recent shift of the beveridge curve copyright 2016 john wiley sons ltd

the social content of macroeconomic policies abstract there is now widespread recognition of the need to integrate macroeconomic policy and social policy but the mainstream approach is one of adding on social policy we argue for a transformatory approach which would mainstream gender equitable social policy within macroeconomic policy we identify three interlinked biases which prevent this from happening deflationary bias male breadwinner bias and commodification bias we illustrate a transformatory approach with the example of the canadian alternative federal budget we argue that a social dialogue is necessary for the formulation of such alternatives