On the Existence of Private Unemployment Insurance with Advance Information on Future Job Losses

We study the existence of a profitable unemployment insurance market in a dynamic economy with adverse selection rooted in workers’ advance information on future job losses. The new feature of the model is that the insurer and workers interact repeatedly. Repeated interactions make it possible to threaten workers with exclusion from future insurance benefits after a default on insurance premia. With exclusion, the insurer can offer not only insurance against unemployment risk itself but also against bad news about a future job loss. In contrast to conventional wisdom, we find that private unemployment insurance in the US can be profitable for a relatively short exclusion length of one year. To stimulate the emergence of a private unemployment insurance market, policy makers can facilitate the creation of a registry that archives past defaults on insurance premia