The insurance function of federal budgets against regional asymmetric income shocksin scal federations is well known in the literature. Empirical studies provide estimates of the amount of stabilisation between the regions. Especially automatic stabilisers, like the unemployment insurance, show a large reaction to regional imbalances. The goal of this paper is to estimate the amount of redistri...

Unemployment insurance and employment protection are typically discussed and studied in isolation. In this paper, we argue that they are tightly linked, and we focus on their joint optimal design. We start our analysis with a simple benchmark, with risk averse workers, risk neutral firms, and random shocks to productivity. In this benchmark, we show that unemployment insurance comes with employ...

Lack of health insurance has been shown to be associated with problems obtaining needed health care (3), and the unemployed are less likely to have health insurance than are their employed counterparts. The number and rate of adults aged 18–64 years lacking health insurance has been increasing, in part due to the historically high unemployment rates. However, even having comprehensive health in...

This paper presents large-sample evidence that firms consider labor unemployment risk when setting their resource adjustment policies. Prior studies find that costs rise more in response to sales increases than they fall in response to sales decreases. Anderson, Banker, and Janakiraman (2003) term this phenomenon “cost stickiness” and attribute it to managers’ deliberate adjustment to committed...

We provide new evidence on the elasticity 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 unemployment durations ...

This paper explores how the introduction of an experience rated system of unemployment insurance affects employment and welfare in a model where implicit contracts between firms and workers give rise to wage rigidities and unemployment. In the literature, it has been argued that experience rated systems of unemployment insurance may reduce long term employment as firms anticipate the higher cos...

In existing unemployment insurance programmes, it is standard to condition eligibility on the previous employment record of unemployed workers. The purpose of this article is to study conditions under which the efficient contract exhibits these properties. In order to do so, we characterize the optimal unemployment insurance contract in asymmetric information environments in which workers exper...

The paper develops an overlapping generations model that highlights interactions between social security, unemployment and growth.The social security system has two components: old age pensions and unemployment insurance. Pensions have a direct effect on economic growth. Both pensions and unemployment benefits influence equilibrium unemployment caused by wage bargaining. Since unemployment impa...