With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including...

This paper proposes a matching model that distinguishes between job creation by existing firms and job creation by firm entrants. The paper argues that vacancy posting and job destruction on the extensive margin, i.e. from firms that enter and exit the labour market, represents a viable...

This Paper challenges the consensus on the nature of unemployment dynamics in Britain. We show that the argument that changes in unemployment arise mostly from changes in the duration of unemployment (rather than in the event of becoming unemployed) is flawed. In fact, while shocks to the...

In this paper we study the contribution of inflows and outflows to the dynamics of unemployment in three European countries, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. We compare performance in these three countries making use of both administrative and labour force survey data. We find that the...

It is argued that a PAYGO system may have useful allocative functions in that it serves as an insurance against not having children and as an enforcement device for 'rotten kids' who are unwilling to pay their parents a pension. It is true that the system has a moral hazard effect in terms of...

When credit markets to finance investment in the human capital of young people are missing, the competitive equilibrium allocation is inefficient. When generations overlap, this failure can be mitigated by properly designed social institutions such as public education and public pensions. We...

This paper investigates how a mandatory activation program in Denmark affects the job finding rate of unemployed workers. The activation program was introduced in an experimental setting where about half of the workers who became unemployed in the period from November 2005 to March 2006 were...

The single most likely way to leave the unemployment insurance (UI) register in Hungary is not by getting a job but by exhausting entitlement to benefit. Two questions follow. First, what are the implications of the cessation of UI for living standards? Second, does UI exhaustion have much...

This Paper analyses the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is...

This paper offers quasi experimental evidence of the existence of spillover effects of UI extensions using a unique program that extended unemployment benefits drastically for a subset of workers in selected regions of Austria. We use non-eligible unemployed in treated regions, and a...