Dieser Beitrag schlägt ein Ein-Monats-Experience-Rating als pragmatische Reform der Finanzierung der Arbeitslosenversicherung in Ländern wie Österreich und Deutschland vor, in denen derzeit einheitliche Arbeitgeberbeiträge gelten. Arbeitgeber würden nach Beendigung eines...

The risk of a worker falling into unemployment represents one of the most important threats to the stability of households' finances - both in terms of lower spending (and hence living standards) and in terms of a greater degree of financial distress (such as the accumulation of unmanageable...

Active labor market programs targeted at older unemployed workers are often believed to be ineffective. We exploit a large-scale randomized experiment involving approximately 50,000 older unemployed workers to evaluate an intensive job search assistance program that focuses on exploiting the...

Cross-border work is expanding in the EU, yet its labor-market effects on the cross-border workers themselves remain largely undocumented. Using linked Belgian administrative registers that identify cross-border spells in Luxembourg, we estimate the effects of cross-border employment on...

This paper studies the fiscal costs of unemployment insurance (UI). It surveys alternative methods used in the literature to estimate the impact of UI on government budgets and compares them within a unified framework that incorporates behavioral responses, wage effects, and fiscal...

We investigate selection into a voluntary unemployment insurance (UI) scheme by exploiting variation in enrollment driven by an early retirement program embedded within the UI system. Using Danish administrative data and an event study design, we identify negative selection among UI enrollees...

We exploit policy discontinuities in Poland’s unemployment insurance to examine the causal effect of changes to both benefit durations and levels. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we uncover three findings: (1) Higher benefit levels distort employment more than benefit extensions....

When searching for employment, workers consider non-wage job characteristics, such as effort requirements or amenities. We study an environment where unemployed workers search for jobs of different quality in a labor market characterized by directed search. In equilibrium, firms are more likely...

The long period of fast economic growth in China has created entrenched patterns of dualization in the labour market, and in social security. Chinese law calls for all employment to be formalized and covered by a relatively generous system of five social insurances, including one for...

This paper provides novel insights into labor market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent recovery period in Uruguay. Using social security administrative records, we focus on the gender-differentiated patterns of labor market transitions following the pandemic outbreak,...

This paper studies how unemployment benefits affect aggregate outcomes through general equilibrium effects. First, we document that lower unemployment benefits tend to reduce the real interest rate in a structural vector autoregression with narrative sign restrictions. Young workers experience...

Die Bund-Länder-Kommission "Zukunftspakt Pflege" soll bis zum Jahresende 2025 Grundlagen für eine Pflegereform erarbeiten. Ihr Arbeitsauftrag steht unter dem Oberziel der Beitragssatzstabilität. Dazu beschäftigt sich die Kommission unter anderem mit der Frage, ob eine erweiterte...

An important principle of the EU is that mobile persons do not lose their social security rights when moving to another Member State. Therefore, the EU rules on the coordination of social security systems provide that persons are entitled to export their benefits to another Member State. Article...

The EU rules on the coordination of social security systems are based on some key principles protecting the social security rights of persons moving within the EU: a) the determination of a single applicable legislation; b) the prohibition of discrimination, reinforced by the equal treatment of...

We evaluate the effectiveness of Belgium's short-time work (STW) program during the Great Recession, a period when the country recorded the highest STW take-up rate in Europe. STW allows firms to reduce working hours in response to temporary shocks while avoiding layoffs, playing a key role in...

The report assesses options as regards the management and operation of a new Unemployment Benefit Fund (UBF) in Eswatini. Two institutions have been proposed by the Government as potential operators - the Public Sector Pension Fund (PSPF) and the Eswatini National Provident Fund (ENPF). Based on...

While extensive research on unemployment insurance (UI) has examined how benefits affect workers' job search, little is known about how eligibility conditions shape firms' hiring decisions. These conditions, often requiring a minimum work history, affect the value workers place on contracts...

Unemployment insurance (UI) acts both as a disincentive for labor supply and as a demand stimulus, which may explain why empirical studies often find limited effects of UI on employment. This paper provides independent estimates of the disincentive effects arising from the largest expansion of...

Cash benefit programmes have increasingly emphasised conditionality and "demanding" forms of activation in recent decades. Behavioural requirements are now a key element in reforms of unemployment benefits (UB) and related out-of-work benefits in high-income OECD countries, and they are the...

We quantify micro and macro effects of changes in the potential benefit duration (PBD) in unemployment insurance. In Poland, the PBD is 12 months for the newly unemployed if the previous year's county unemployment rate is more than 150% of the national average, and 6 months otherwise. We exploit...

In the United States, workers whose past earnings were below a threshold are generally ineligible for unemployment insurance (UI), creating a discontinuous jump in the value of being unemployed. Using a regression discontinuity design with administrative panel data, we estimate a sizable local...

In a union of states with partial mobility of households and firms we analyze the setting of minimum wages against the background of unemployment insurance. We find that unemployment insurance is always efficiently organized by decentral decisions. In contrast, for symmetric states only the...

This paper tests whether partially unemployed workers value future preserved benefits when they bunch at the kink of the unemployment insurance benefit-withdrawal schedule. I extend the bunching formula of Saez (2010) to a dynamic setting that accounts for the value of future benefits tied to...

The United States experienced an unprecedented increase in unemployment insurance (UI) claims beginning in March 2020. State UI-benefit systems were strained beyond their administrative capacity to process the dual challenge of an unprecedented increase in claims and changes to UI benefits. In...

Female workers in China have a de jure right to maternity benefits, as enshrined in policy and legal documents since the 1950s. This article examines why this entitlement is not always de facto guaranteed as stipulated in the legislation. We use the conceptual framework of gradual institutional...

Die Bund-Länder-Kommission "Zukunftspakt Pflege" soll bis zum Jahresende 2025 Grundlagen für eine Pflegereform erarbeiten. Ihr Arbeitsauftrag steht unter dem Oberziel der Beitragssatzstabilität. Dazu beschäftigt sich die Kommission unter anderem mit der Frage, ob eine erweiterte...

The UK's working-age benefit system includes two types of health-related benefits: incapacity benefits for those whose health limits their ability to work and disability benefits for those whose health imposes significant additional living costs. There were big cuts to the generosity of the UK's...

This working paper presents an overview of the gradual development of the Soviet welfare system from the October Revolution of 1917 to the country’s dissolution in 1991. It examines all major social welfare programmes in the Soviet Union and their generosity – understood as the combination...

In this paper, we present QMDE, an empirical quarterly stock-flow consistent (SFC) model of Denmark. It is categorized as a medium-sized model to strike a balance between complexity and economic intuition. This model provides a nuanced understanding of Denmark's economic structure, segmenting it...

his paper studies how the unemployment insurance system should be designed when considering costly self-control. The standard optimal unemployment insurance with dynamic moral hazard features declining benefits over the unemployment spell, without a lower bound on consumption...