The federal-state system of unemployment insurance (UI) in the United States was established by the Social Security Act of 1935 during the Great Depression. Under the program, states provide temporary partial wage replacement to involuntarily unemployed workers with significant labor force...

The paper provides a theoretical rationale for flexicurity policies, which consist of low employment protection, generous unemployment insurance and active labor market programmes. It analyzes in which conditions flexicurity can be optimal. Low employment protection encourages costly education...

This paper studies the role of social policies in different European welfare states regarding minimum income protection and active inclusion. The core focus lies on crisis resilience, i.e. the capacity of social policy arrangements to contain poverty and inequality and avoid exclusion before,...

This paper studies the role and performance of social policies in different European welfare states regarding minimum income protection during periods of crisis. To achieve this goal, the paper expands its analytical focus to include other tiers of social protection, in particular upstream...

This paper analyses the effect of unemployment insurance generosity and active labour market policy on reemployment stability in Europe. Using EU-SILC and OECD data, we conduct discrete time survival analyses with shared frailty specification to identify policy effects at the micro and macro...

This paper considers the role of flexicurity when jobs must be reallocated from a declining, traditional sector to a skill intensive expanding sector. Workers initially decide whether to acquire qualifications for skill-intensive tasks or to accept a less demanding traditional job. Unemployment...

We propose an explanation of why Europeans choose to work fewer hours than Americans and also suffer higher rates of unemployment. Labor market regulations, unemployment benefits, and high levels of public consumption in many European countries reduce, ceteris paribus, the gains from being...

The empirical literature on unemployment insurance has focused on its direct effect on unemployment duration, while the potential indirect effect on employment stability through a more efficient matching process, as the unemployed can search for a longer period, has attracted much less...

Using cross-country data, we investigate the determinants of reservation wages and their course over the jobless spell. Higher unemployment benefits lead to higher reservation wages. Further, again consistent with the basic search model, repeated observations on the same individual provide scant...

The existing studies of unemployment benefit and unemployment duration suggest that reforms that lower either the level or the duration of benefits should reduce unemployment. Despite the large number of such reforms implemented in Europe in the past decades, this paper presents evidence that...