This paper quantitatively investigates the scope for improving welfare by making aspects of the unemployment insurance (UI) system depend on the state of the business cycle. A particular focus is the Canadian system of "Employment Insurance" (EI), which is designed in such a way that the...

The paper focuses on empirical analysis of major factors that determine innovation activities of Russian manufacturing firms during the crisis. We presume that the crisis has ambiguous effects on firms' behaviour, on one hand limiting their financial capabilities to invest into new products...

This paper investigates the time-varying correlation between the EU12-wide business cycle and the initial EU12 member-countries based on Scalar-BEKK and multivariate Riskmetrics model frameworks for the period 1980-2012. The paper provides evidence that changes in the business cycle...

This paper examines the spatial interaction of neighboring cities over their employment cycles. The cycles of neighboring cities tend to be more similar to one another than are those of non-neighboring cities, although this is due primarily to neighbors' tendency to be in the same state. In...

What matters to economic decision-making is whether the economy has become more or less predictable. People and businesses use information around them to form judgements about what might happen in the future. The rise in uncertainty might be associated with increased concern about extreme...

I present a model of optimal contracts between firms and workers, under limited commitment and with worker savings. A central feature of the model is that firms can provide insurance against unemployment, by targeting a path of wages that encourages wealth accumulation. I provide an analytical...

Unemployment Accounts (UA) are mandatory individual saving accounts that can be used by governments as an alternative to the Unemployment Insurance (UI) system. I study a two tier UA-UI system where the unemployed withdraw from their unemployment account until it is exhausted and then receive...

A vast theoretical and empirical literature has focused on the effects of unemployment insurance benefits on the decisions of the recipients and how these decisions influence their labor market outcomes. Three strands of literature are discussed in this paper: (i) the impact of unemployment...

In this paper, we study the interaction between self insurance and public insurance. In particular, we provide evidence on the relationship between unemployment insurance benefits and home production using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the state-level unemployment insurance data of...

This paper considers the design of optimal unemployment insurance with multiple types of job. The environment is an extension of Hopenhayn and Nicolini(1997). We study the model by using the fi�rst-order approach. The optimal contract still displays benefit� decreasing over the length of the...