Since July 2004, the job search effort of long-term unemployed benefit claimants has been monitored in Belgium. We exploit the discontinuity in the treatment assignment at the age of 30 present in the first year of the reform to evaluate the effect of a notification sent at least eight months...

DellaVigna and Paserman (2005) and Paserman (2008) have shown that imposing job search requirements on sophisticated unemployed benefit claimants with hyperbolic time preferences is Pareto improving in that it raises welfare for the unemployed, by limiting harmful procrastination, and for...