We exploit a policy discontinuity at U.S. state borders to identify the effects of unemployment insurance policies on unemployment. Our estimates imply that most of the persistent increase in unemployment during the Great Recession can be accounted for by the unprecedented extensions of...

During the recent recession only 17 states offered short-time compensation (STC) - pro-rated unemployment benefits for workers whose hours are reduced for economic reasons. New federal legislation will encourage the expansion of STC. Exploiting cross-state variation in STC, we present new...

I investigate in this paper partial equilibrium labor supply responses to unemployment insurance (UI) in the US. I use administrative data on the universe of unemployment spells in five states from the late 1970s to 1984, and non-parametrically identify the effect of both benefit level and...

Wage insurance is a program that attempts to help permanently displaced workers transition to employment rapidly, effectively, and equitably. Because displaced workers have been found to suffer substantial earnings losses when they become reemployed, a wage insurance program provides a temporary...

In this paper, U.S. data on labor market histories of displaced workers are used to quantify the effect of Unemployment Insurance Compensation (UIC) on both unemployment and employment durations. This results in the first available assessment of the effect that UIC has on the fraction of time...

Recent efforts to expand unemployment insurance (UI) eligibility are expected to increase low-earning workers' access to UI. Although the expansion's aim is to smooth the income and consumption of previously ineligible workers, it is possible that UI benefits simply displace other sources of...

While the Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is one of the largest safety net program in the U.S., research on its benefits is limited. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in state UI laws to empirically estimate whether UI generosity mitigates any of the previously documented...