We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

In the context of a standard equilibrium matching framework, this paper considers how a duration dependent unemployment insurance (UI) system affects the dynamics of unemployment and wages in an economy subject to stochastic job-destruction shocks. It establishes that re-entitlement effects...

We argue that the main difference between European and American labor markets is not so much in the unemployment rates, but maybe more importantly in the reduced flows into and out of unemployment, in Europe. Employment protection legislations (EPL) have been extensively studied in the...

Bismarckian social security systems are associated with larger public pension expenditures, a smaller fraction of private pension and lower income inequality than Beveridgean systems. This paper introduces a bidimensional voting model to account for all these features. Agents differ in age,...

We derive the shape of optimal unemployment insurance contracts when agents can exert search effort but have private information about their search technology. We derive a recursive solution of our adverse selection problem with repeated moral hazard. Conditions under which the UI agency should...

In developing economies, substantial economic activity takes place in the informal labor market, beyond the reach of government policy. Labor market policies, which by definition apply only to the formal-sector labor market, then have important spillover effects. The relative sizes of the...

Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We...

This paper evaluates to what extent the introduction of firing costs can affect the aggregate dynamics of a neoclassical growth model with heterogeneous establishments. Similarly to the previous literature, firing costs are found to have large steady-state effects. However, they have no...