This paper develops a new method to estimate the trend unemployment rate in which the duration profile of unemployment hazards is taken into account. The duration profile is characterized by three ...time-varying elements—level, slope, and curvature. The model also recovers the duration component of trend unemployment rate and the trend mean duration of unemployment. The estimated trend unemployment rate declines by about 3 percentage points between 1980 and 2019. Its short-term duration component decreases, whereas the long-term component increases, resulting in a rise in the trend mean duration of unemployment. The opposite trends in duration components suggest falling frictional unemployment but rising structural unemployment.
With the emergence of the Great Recession unemployment insurance (UI) is once again at the heart of the policy debate. In this paper, we review the recent theoretical and empirical evidence on the ...labor market effects of UI design. We also discuss policy issues related to UI design, including the structure of benefits, the role of liquidity constraints and the pros and cons of a UI system in which the generosity of UI benefits is varying over the business cycle. Finally, we identify potential areas of future research.
In response to the recession of 2007–2009, the maximum duration of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to an unprecedented 99 weeks. We exploit variation in the timing and size of ...the UI benefit extensions across states to estimate their overall impact on unemployment exits, comparing the most recent and prior extension episodes. We find a small but statistically significant increase in labor force attachment due to extended UI in both periods with little or no impact on job finding. Despite these small estimates, extended benefits can account for a substantial share of the increase in long-term unemployment.
We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the ...period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more responsive to benefit levels during the recession and its aftermath, with an elasticity between 0.65 and 0.9 as compared to about 0.35 pre-recession.
Using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97) data for 2005–8, we find that unemployed persons who look for work online are re-employed about 25% faster than comparable workers who do not ...search online. This finding contrasts with previous results for 1998–2001, and is robust to controls for cognitive test scores and detailed indicators of Internet access. Internet job search (IJS) appears to be most effective in reducing unemployment durations when used to contact friends and relatives, to send out resumes or fill out applications and also to look at advertisements. We detect a weak positive relationship between IJS and wage growth between jobs.
We discuss three important properties of panel data event study designs. First, assuming constant treatment effects before and/or after some event time, also known as binning, is a natural ...restriction, which identifies dynamic treatment effects in the absence of never‐treated units. Second, event study designs with binned endpoints and distributed‐lag models are numerically identical. Third, classic dummy variable event study designs can be generalized to models that account for multiple treatments of different signs and varying intensities. We demonstrate the practical relevance of our methodological points in an application studying the effects of unemployment benefit duration on job search effort.
I denne artikkelen presenterer vi en institusjonell etnografi av NAVs oppfølging av arbeidsledige. Basert på en dokumentanalyse og dybdeintervjuer med arbeidsledig ungdom og NAV-ansatte, utforsker vi ...hvordan målingen av arbeidsevne er organisert i praksis, og hvilke konsekvenser denne organiseringen får for de arbeidslediges hverdag. Analysen viser hvordan prinsippet om at de som står lengst unna arbeidslivet skal få mest gjør at de svakeste brukergruppene blir underlagt mest måling og kontroll, og at formelle krav til dokumentasjon ofte kan komme i veien for oppfølgingen. Ved å vise spenningene mellom arbeidslinjas idealer og menneskers erfaring av hvordan disse realiseres i praksis, gir artikkelen en ny forståelse av NAV og den institusjonelle konstruksjonen av arbeidsledighet.
This paper contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between business cycles and mental health. It is one of the first applications in the economics literature to incorporate data on ...web searches from Google Insights for Search, and these unique data allow the opportunity to estimate the association between weekly unemployment insurance (UI) claims, in addition to monthly unemployment rates, and search indexes for “depression” and “anxiety”. Results from state fixed effects models yield (1) a positive relationship between the unemployment rate and the depression search index and (2) a negative relationship between initial UI claims on the one hand and the depression and anxiety search indexes on the other. A lag analysis also shows that an extended period of higher levels of continued UI claims is associated with a higher depression search index.
We provide new evidence that firms appear to manage long-run earnings upward in order to manage rank and file employees’ perceptions of employment security. In particular, we exploit exogenous ...state-level changes in unemployment insurance benefits and test for partial unwinding of prior upward earnings management when benefits increase. Consistent with the hypothesis, we find a significant reduction in abnormal accruals, increased recognition of special items and write downs, and greater likelihood of net income-reducing restatements, following an increase in state-level unemployment benefits. A number of cross-sectional results are also consistent with the hypothesis.
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