We study how the marginal welfare gain from increasing the unemployment insurance (UI) benefit level varies over the business cycle. We do this by estimating how the moral hazard cost and the ...consumption smoothing benefit of UI vary with labour market conditions, which we identify using variation in the interaction of UI benefit levels with the unemployment rate within U.S. states over time. We find that the moral hazard cost is procyclical, greater when the unemployment rate is relatively low. By contrast, we do not find evidence that the consumption smoothing benefit varies with the unemployment rate. We use these empirical results to estimate the marginal welfare gain, and we find that it is modest on average, but varies positively with the unemployment rate.
This paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the U.S., modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities. The major findings are: 1) the ...average U.S. unemployed worker devotes about 41
min to job search on weekdays, which is substantially more than their European counterparts; 2) workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker; 3) across the 50 states and D.C., job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits, with an elasticity between −1.6 and −2.2; 4) job search intensity for those eligible for Unemployment Insurance (UI) increases prior to benefit exhaustion; and 5) time devoted to job search is fairly constant regardless of unemployment duration for those who are ineligible for UI.
Not Working Blanchflower, David G
2019, 2021, 2019-06-18
eBook
A candid assessment of why the job market is not as healthy as we think
Don't trust low unemployment numbers as proof that the labor market is doing fine—it isn't. Not Working is about those who ...can’t find full-time work at a decent wage—the underemployed—and how their plight is contributing to widespread despair, a worsening drug epidemic, and the unchecked rise of right-wing populism.
In this revelatory and outspoken book, David Blanchflower draws on his acclaimed work in the economics of labor and well-being to explain why today's postrecession economy is vastly different from what came before. He calls out our leaders and policymakers for failing to see the Great Recession coming, and for their continued failure to address one of the most unacknowledged social catastrophes of our time. Blanchflower shows how many workers are underemployed or have simply given up trying to find a well-paying job, how wage growth has not returned to prerecession levels despite rosy employment indicators, and how general prosperity has not returned since the crash of 2008.
Standard economic measures are often blind to these forgotten workers, which is why Blanchflower practices the economics of walking about—seeing for himself how ordinary people are faring under the recovery, and taking seriously what they say and do. Not Working is his candid report on how the young and the less skilled are among the worst casualties of underemployment, how immigrants are taking the blame, and how the epidemic of unhappiness and self-destruction will continue to spread unless we deal with it.
Contrary to standard search models predictions, past studies have not found a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. We estimate a positive UI wage effect exploiting an ...age-based regression discontinuity design in Austria. A search model incorporating duration dependence predicts two countervailing forces: UI induces workers to seek higher-wage jobs, but reduces wages by lengthening unemployment. Matching-function heterogeneity plausibly generates a negative relationship between the UI unemployment-duration and wage effects, which holds empirically in our sample and across studies, reconciling disparate wage-effect estimates. Empirically, UI raises wages by improving reemployment firm quality and attenuating wage drops.
The distribution of unemployment duration in our equilibrium matching model with spell-dependent unemployment benefits displays time-varying exit rates. Building on semi-Markov processes, we ...translate these rates into an expression for the aggregate unemployment rate. Structural estimation using German microdata allows us to discuss the effects of an unemployment benefit reform (Hartz IV). The reform reduced unemployment by less than 0.1 percentage points. Contrary to general beliefs, the net wage for most skill and regional groups increased. Taking the insurance effect of unemployment benefits into account, however, the reform is welfare reducing for 76% of workers.
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