Endogenous unemployment insurance and regionalisation

Our analysis is concerned with the impact of a regionalisation of unemployment insurance (UI) on workers’ preferences, on firms’ profits, and on effciency. The existence and the extent of UI are endogenously derived by maximising an objective function of the state. Three different types of regionalisation are considered which differ with respect to the area the UI objective function is related to, and with respect to the policy variable used to maximise it. It comes to light that workers are always in favour of central UI, while it depends on the type of regionalisation whether or not firms are better off with regional or with central UI. The same somewhat surprising result applies for efficiency.