Conventional wisdom suggests that unemployment benefits create a stronger geographic attachment by lowering the willingness of the unemployed to accept job offers. We assess empirically the effect of benefits on geographic labour mobility using individual data from the European Community...

Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent...

Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary "decomposition" approach that compares the...