In a life-cycle model, we calculate the contribution of the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) on the unemployment rates in Canada and the U.S. The model predicts a 0.81% difference in unemployment rates (one third of the actual difference) in these countries. Social welfare improves if the benefit ratio increases from 45 percent to 55 percent of the working income. Savings drop and aver...

Two pension reforms in Austria increased the early retirement age (ERA) from 60 to 62 for men and from 55 to 58.25 for women. We find that raising the ERA increased employment by 9.75 percentage points among affected men and by 11 percentage points among affected women. The reforms had large spillover effects on the unemployment insurance program but negligible effects on disability insurance c...

With this study, a cross disciplinary team of the Center for Construction Policy Research has taken a first and significant step in documenting employee misclassification in the Massachusetts construction industry. This report documents the dimensions of misclassification and its implications for tax collection and worker compensation insurance. Misclassification occurs when employers treat wor...

This paper considers optimal unemployment insurance (UI) with unobserved search e¤ort and savings. Assuming linear search costs, it develops new variational arguments which identify a solution to the necessary conditions for optimality. The structure of the optimal UI program has unusual, yet highly intuitive, properties. A numerical example …nds the optimal policy is well approximated by a lum...

Modelling the Time on Unemployment Insurance Benefits A duration model based on the time on Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits instead of a model based on the time till re-employment is more relevant from a cost-benefit perspective. The contribution of this paper is to extend the standard (mixed) Proportional Hazard model to account for an upper bound on the duration. We use a modified mover-...

Social insurance is a subject I have been studying for nearly 40 years. The intellectual and policy revolution in social insurance that is occurring around the world is among the most significant and positive developments of current economics. Social insurance programs have become the most important, the most expensive, and often the most controversial aspect of government domestic policy, not ...

Excerpt] Relatively little has been written about unemployment relief during the period between the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 and the adoption of national unemployment insurance in 1911. This study is an attempt to help fill the gap in the literature. It examines the changing roles played by poor relief, private charity, trade unions, and public employment in the lives of th...

*Commissioner for Social Security. Wage loss incurred by disability is one of the most serious threats to the economic security of American workers. The illogicality of paying benefits to an unemployed worker only so long as he remains able to work, and stopping those payments when he becomes ill, has been evident ever since unemployment benefits became payable, and States and their employment ...

As I've listened to the presentations and discussion at this conference over the past two days, I have been fascinated by the clear shift in the professional consensus on unemployment that has taken place during the past two decades. Twenty years ago, when I first started writing about how unemployment insurance and other labor market policies increase the rate of unemployment, l these were rad...