Unemployment Insurance in Theory and Practice

A hallmark of modern labour economics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance (UI) provides a good illustration. The economics of UI has been a very active research area over the past 25 years or so. New theoretical approaches, in particular job-search theory, have inspired a large amount of empirical research, some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy.