The paper examines the employment and unemployment implications of permitting unemployed people to use part of their … unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. This opportunity to transfer unemployment … benefits, `benefit transfers', would help replace the unemployment trap by providing an incentive to seek and provide jobs. The …

opportunity to use part of their unemployment benefits to provide employment vouchers to the firms that hire them. The vouchers … would depend positively on unemployment duration and training. The paper argues that this policy would give unemployed … failures generated and amplified by unemployment benefit systems. A simple theoretical model is presented, followed by …

unemployment rates. It may be the case that this locus is steep enough to generate increasing returns to education. This may lead … unskilled are more exposed to unemployment relative to the skilled, as compared with the latter. The two equilibria cannot be …

vouchers on employment and unemployment, the analysis shows how the optimal policy depends on the rates of hiring and firing … the level of unemployment benefits in optimal policy design. …