Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. Typically, a caseworker reviews the unemployed worker's employment contacts at some frequency, and applies sanctions if certain requirements are not met. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment...

This paper studies habit formation in consumption preferences in a dynamic Mirrlees economy. We derive optimal labor and savings wedges based on a recursive approach. We show that habit formation creates a motive for subsidizing labor supply and savings. In particular, habit formation...

We ask whether offering a menu of unemployment insurance contracts is welfare-improving in a heterogeneous population. We adopt a repeated moral hazard framework as in Shavell/Weiss (1979), supplemented by unobserved heterogeneity about agents’ job opportunities. Our main theoretical...

This paper considers the problem of optimal unemployment insurance in a moral hazard framework. Unlike existing literature, unemployed workers can secretly participate in a hidden labor market; as a consequence, an endogenous lower bound for promised utility preventing "immiserization" arises....

Since the probability of finding a job is affected not only by individual effort but also by the aggregate state of the economy, designing unemployment insurance payments conditional on the business cycle could be valuable. This paper answers a fundamental question related to this issue: How...

Some existing welfare programs (“work-first”) require participants to work in exchange for benefits. Others (“job search-first”) emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. This paper studies the optimal design of welfare programs...

This paper demonstrates how economic theory can be combined with state-of-the-art empirics to make quantitative statements about optimal policy. Using a large administrative data set for West Germany as well as nonparametric and semiparametric estimation techniques, I parameterize the model...

This paper reports the results from a laboratory experiment which investigates the structure of contracts that emerge in overlapping-generation firms where future ownership is a perquisite of employment. Workers in the young generation are offered employment contracts designed by the firms'...