In 2003-05 the German government implemented a number of far-reaching labor market reforms y the so-called Hartz reforms. At the heart of the reform package was the Hartz IV law, which resulted in a ...significant cut in the unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. The paper develops a macroeconomic model with search and incomplete markets, calibrates the model economy to German data and institutions, and uses the calibrated model economy to simulate the effects of the Hartz reforms, and in particular Hartz IV, on the German labor market. The paper finds that the Hartz IV reform reduced the noncyclical unemployment rate in Germany by 1.4 percentage points. Employed workers benefited from the Hartz IV reform in welfare terms, but unemployed workers lost. It further finds that the Hartz I—III reforms reduced the noncyclical unemployment rate in Germany by 1.5 percentage points. Finally, the authors' analysis suggests that the Hartz reforms contributed to the good performance of the German labor market during the Great Recession.
Many countries have a two-tiered unemployment compensation system that provides earnings-related unemployment insurance for a limited period of time and less generous unemployment assistance ...thereafter. This study evaluates the effects of a reform in Finland that increased the level of unemployment assistance by 22%. The reform led to a drop of 9% in the unemployment exit hazard, which can be attributed to fewer exits to both employment and inactivity. The implied elasticities suggest that a 10% increase in unemployment assistance reduces the unemployment exit hazard by 4% and the job-finding hazard by 6%. These effects are relatively small compared to the existing evidence on the effects of unemployment insurance benefits.
We use high-frequency Google search data, combined with data on the announcement dates of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic in U.S. states, to disentangle the ...short-run direct impacts of multiple different state-level NPIs in an event study framework. Exploiting differential timing in the announcements of restaurant and bar limitations, non-essential business closures, stay-at-home orders, large-gatherings bans, school closures, and emergency declarations, we leverage the high-frequency search data to separately identify the effects of multiple NPIs that were introduced around the same time. We then describe a set of assumptions under which proxy outcomes can be used to estimate a causal parameter of interest when data on the outcome of interest are limited. Using this method, we quantify the share of overall growth in unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic that was directly due to each of these state-level NPIs. We find that between March 14 and 28, restaurant and bar limitations and non-essential business closures can explain 6.0% and 6.4% of UI claims respectively, while the other NPIs did not directly increase own-state UI claims. This suggests that most of the short-run increase in UI claims during the pandemic was likely due to other factors, including declines in consumer demand, local policies, and policies implemented by private firms and institutions.
•We analyze how shutdown policies affected unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic.•We use proxy data from Google Trends to disentangle the effects of six policies.•State-level policies caused 12.4% of unemployment insurance claims early on.•Restaurant limits and non-essential business closures had modest effects.•Other policies (e.g. stay-at-home orders, school closures) had no additional effect.
This paper uses readily accessible aggregate time series to measure the probability that an employed worker becomes unemployed and the probability that an unemployed worker finds a job, the ins and ...outs of unemployment. Since 1948, the job finding probability has accounted for three-quarters of the fluctuations in the unemployment rate in the United States and the employment exit probability for one-quarter. Fluctuations in the employment exit probability are quantitatively irrelevant during the last two decades. Using the underlying microeconomic data, the paper shows that these results are not due to compositional changes in the pool of searching workers, nor are they due to movements of workers in and out of the labor force. These results contradict the conventional wisdom that has guided the development of macroeconomic models of the labor market since 1990.
► The job finding rate is strongly procyclical. ► The employment exit probability is weakly countercyclical. ► This holds in models with and without a participation margin. ► This holds after accounting for worker heterogeneity.
One goal of extending the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) in recessions is to increase UI coverage in the face of longer unemployment spells. Although it is a common concern that such ...extensions may themselves raise nonemployment durations, it is not known how recessions would affect the magnitude of this moral hazard. To obtain causal estimates of the differential effects of UI in booms and recessions, this article exploits the fact that in Germany, potential UI benefit duration is a function of exact age which is itself invariant over the business cycle. We implement a regression discontinuity design separately for 20 years and correlate our estimates with measures of the business cycle. We find that the nonemployment effects of a month of additional UI benefits are, at best, somewhat declining in recessions. Yet the UI exhaustion rate, and therefore the additional coverage provided by UI extensions, rises substantially during a downturn. The ratio of these two effects represents the nonemployment response of workers weighted by the probability of being affected by UI extensions. Hence, our results imply that the effective moral hazard effect of UI extensions is significantly lower in recessions than in booms. Using a model of job search with liquidity constraints, we also find that in the absence of market-wide effects, the net social benefits from UI extensions can be expressed either directly in terms of the exhaustion rate and the nonemployment effect of UI durations, or as a declining function of our measure of effective moral hazard.
While the unemployment insurance (UI) program is one of the largest safety net programs in the United States, research on its benefits is limited. This paper exploits plausibly exogenous changes in ...state UI laws to empirically estimate whether UI generosity mitigates any of the previously documented negative health effects of job loss. The results show that higher UI generosity increases health insurance coverage and utilization, with stronger effects during periods of high unemployment rates. During such periods, higher UI generosity also leads to improved self-reported health. Finally, I find no effects on risky behaviors or health conditions.
Fiscal Policy in an Unemployment Crisis RENDAHL, PONTUS
Review of economic studies/The review of economic studies,
07/2016, Letnik:
83, Številka:
3 (296)
Journal Article
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This article shows that equilibrium unemployment dynamics can significantly increase the efficacy of fiscal policy. In response to a shock that brings the economy into a liquidity trap, an expansion ...in government spending increases output and causes a fall in the unemployment rate. Since movements in unemployment are persistent, the effects of current spending prevail into the future, leading to an enduring rise in income. As an enduring rise in income boosts private demand, an increase in government spending sets in motion a virtuous employment-spending spiral with large effects on macroeconomic aggregates.
Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. ...Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finding but a reduction in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early 2014.
We use the high-frequency, decentralized implementation of stay-at-home (SAH) orders in the United States to disentangle the labor market effects of SAH orders from the general economic disruption ...wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that each week of SAH exposure increased a state's weekly initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims by 1.9% of its employment level relative to other states. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that of the 17 million UI claims between March 14 and April 4, only 4 million were attributable to SAH orders. We present a currency union model to provide conditions for mapping this estimate to aggregate employment losses.
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