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Jel Classification:J65 

Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of Time-Consistent Unemployment Insurance

During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the classic time-inconsistency problem arises. During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these extensions. Because of the trade-off between insurance and ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2016-11

Journal Article
Student Loans Under the Risk of Youth Unemployment

While most college graduates eventually find jobs that match their qualifications, the possibility of long spells of unemployment and/or underemployment?combined with ensuing difficulties in repaying student loans?may limit and even dissuade productive investments in human capital. The author explores the optimal design of student loans when young college graduates can be unemployed and reaches three main conclusions. First, the optimal student loan program must incorporate an unemployment compensation mechanism as a key element, even if unemployment probabilities are endogenous and subject ...
Review , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , Pages 129-158

Report
Micro and Macro Effects of UI Policies: Evidence from Missouri

We develop a method to jointly measure the response of worker search effort (micro effect) and vacancy creation (macro effect) to changes in the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. To implement this approach, we exploit an unexpected cut in UI durations in Missouri and provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effect of UI on the labor market. The data indicate that the cut in Missouri significantly increased job finding rates by both raising the search effort of unemployed workers and the availability of jobs. The latter accounts for at least one half of the total effect.
Staff Reports , Paper 905

Working Paper
How Should Unemployment Insurance Vary over the Business Cycle?

We study optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle using a heterogeneous agent job search model with aggregate risk and incomplete markets. We validate the model-implied micro and macro labor market elasticities to changes in UI generosity against existing estimates, and provide an explanation for divergent empirical findings. We show that generating the observed demographic differences between UI recipients and non-recipients is critical in determining the magnitudes of these elasticities. We find that the optimal policy features countercyclical replacement rates with ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-022

Journal Article
Increasing Employment by Halting Pandemic Unemployment Benefits

In mid-2021, 26 states halted participation in all or some federal emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) programs before those programs' federal funding lapsed. This article uses this asynchronous EUB cessation between early- and late-halting states to estimate the causal impact of benefit cessation on employment. We find that cessation increased employment by 29 persons for every 100 (pre-halt) EUB recipients. Expressed as a number of jobs, if all states had halted EUB in June, September employment would have been 3.4 million persons higher relative to a no-halt counterfactual. Late-halting ...
Review , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , Pages 166-177

Working Paper
UI Generosity and Job Acceptance: Effects of the 2020 CARES Act

To provide economic relief following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. CARES Act granted an extra $600 per week in unemployment insurance (UI) benefit payments from late March through July 2020. This unprecedented increase in UI generosity caused weekly benefit payments to exceed prior earnings for most recipients, raising concern that many would be unwilling to accept job offers, slowing the labor market recovery. To assess the impact of the UI supplement, we analyze the job acceptance decision in a dynamic framework in which job seekers weigh the value of a job against remaining ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2021-13

Working Paper
Using the Eye of the Storm to Predict the Wave of Covid-19 UI Claims

We leverage an event-study research design focused on the seven costliest hurricanes to hit the US mainland since 2004 to identify the elasticity of unemployment insurance filings with respect to search intensity. Applying our elasticity estimate to the state-level Google Trends indexes for the topic “unemployment,” we show that out-of-sample forecasts made ahead of the official data releases for March 21 and 28 predicted to a large degree the extent of the Covid-19 related surge in the demand for unemployment insurance. In addition, we provide a robust assessment of the uncertainty ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2020-10

Working Paper
The Value of Unemployment Insurance: Liquidity vs. Insurance Value

This paper argues that the value of unemployment insurance (UI) can be decomposed into a liquidity component and an insurance component. While the liquidity component captures the value of relieving the cost to access liquidity during unemployment, the insurance component captures the value of protecting the worker against a potential permanent future income loss. We develop a novel sufficient statistics method to identify each component that requires only the labor supply responses to changes in the potential duration of UI and severance payment and implement it using Spanish administrative ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-16

Newsletter
How do unemployment benefits relate to job search behavior?

We examine the relationship between unemployment insurance and job search using data from 2013 through 2019. Our research shows that the unemployed exert a high level of effort to find work. This is especially true for those receiving unemployment insurance benefits. Those who have exhausted their unemployment benefits search less intensely for work, but are also willing to accept work that pays considerably less than their prior job.
Chicago Fed Letter , Issue 441 , Pages 6

Working Paper
Advance Layoff Notices and Labor Market Forecasting

We collect rich establishment-level data about advance layoff notices filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act since January 1990. We present in-sample evidence that the number of workers affected by WARN notices leads state-level initial unemployment insurance claims, changes in the unemployment rate, and changes in private employment. The effects are strongest at the one and two-month horizons. After aggregating state-level information to a national-level “WARN factor” using a dynamic factor model, we find that the factor substantially improves ...
Working Papers , Paper 20-03

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Birinci, Serdar 15 items

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