On August 7th, 1960, in less than a year from now, it will be twenty years since an unemployment insurance scheme was started in Canada. It is perhaps appropriate at this time to review the development of the scheme,and evaluate its impact on the Canadian economy. [...]

Thesis (doctoral)--Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz.

In this study, I examine the influence of unemployment insurance benefits on labour force participation, employment, and unemployment. Conclusions are developed concerning the consequences of the 1971 revision of the Canadian unemployment insurance programme, which differ from those of earlier writings in this field. My model estimates the proportions of the population in each labour force state (employment, unemployment, and "not in the labour force"). Each labour force state proportion is modelled as a function of the gross flows between the labour force states. This model resembles a Markov model and is similar to the model developed by Toikka (197 6). The decisions by employers and employees that generate the gross flows between labour force states are modelled as behavioural functions of economic variables. Unlike other studies, this study imposes strict consistency between equations due to the conservation of the population in the gross flows. Other studies have tended to be single equation models and the specification of the equations between studies and in one case, within a study, is not consistent. The model is estimated for ten age-sex populations. It is estimated using monthly' data for the period 1961 to 1975. The estimation method is Full Information Maximum Likelihood. Because the system of three equations is singular, one equation is redundant and may be dropped during estimation. Estimation is independent of which equation is dropped. This study brings evidence to support the position that different groups respond in different ways to changes in unemployment insurance. According to the model, prime age men are unresponsive to short-term fluctuations in incentives. Young and old men appear to reduce their labour supply when unemployment insurance benefits are increased. This is the net effect of changes in the gross flows between labour force states. The model suggests that the net labour force participation of women increases in response to increases in unemployment Insurance benefits. Men and women differ in their response to unemployment insurance in two additional ways. First estimated responses for women are generally greater than those for men. While women respond seasonally and non-seasonally to unemployment insurance, the response by men tends to be restricted to seasonal behaviour. These findings are consistent with earlier findings in that they suggest a general increase in unemployment and labour force participation due to increases In unemployment insurance. Although my findings suggest some unemployment insurance—induced quit behaviour, they do not suggest a decline in the aggregate level of employment. The dominant result in this study is that unemployment insurance Induces labour force participation, which places upward pressure on employment and unemployment. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1941. / Typescript. Includes abstract and vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-331).

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This dissertation contains three chapters in macroeconomics that study the financing and provision of unemployment insurance. The first chapter studies cross-sectional differences in U.S. state provision of unemployment insurance and the distortionary effects of federal unemployment benefit subsidies in a dynamic labor search model. The paper has two main findings. First, differences in the job-separation rate and the job-finding rate within the model can generate the negative correlation between the average benefit provided by a state and the state's unemployment rate, as observed in the data. Secondly, the model shows how the federal subsidization of unemployment benefit extensions in high-unemployment states causes an over-provision of the benefit, which in turn increases the unemployment rate in those states. Because the extensions are federally subsidized, however, the welfare loss due to the distortion is offset by the benefits of redistribution between states. The second chapter studies the optimal government monitoring of job search effort by unemployment insurance recipients. The theoretical model is a labor search economy with imperfectly observable search effort. The government observes a signal that is correlated with job search effort and must decide the threshold level of the signal that determines continued UI eligibility. The results of the numerical analysis show that the government increases this threshold level at each duration of the unemployment spell. Further, an increasing threshold profile can generate a sharp increase and subsequent drop-off in search effort near the expiration of benefits as observed in the data. The third chapter studies the optimal mix of distortionary capital and labor taxes in an altruistic economy. This problem is addressed by solving a dynamic general equilibrium model with production, in which finitely-lived individuals are linked inter-generationally through altruistic preferences. The government is tasked with financing an exogenous stream of government spending by levying distortionary capital and labor income taxes in a way that minimizes welfare loss in the economy. The numerical results show that nearly all government revenue should be raised through the labor income tax. / text

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Lausanne.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis advisor: Matthew S. Rutledge / Thesis advisor: Christopher F. Baum / Social insurance programs exist in the United States to help workers maintain their standard of living across different states of the world. Examples include unemployment insurance, which aids workers through the state of being unemployed, and Social Security, which supports workers through the state of retirement. The three essays in this dissertation study how these types of social insurance programs alter the decisions workers make in the labor market. The first and third essays focus on unemployment insurance, where the first essay focuses on how different types of workers make decisions in the presence of unemployment insurance and the third essay studies how all workers respond to changes in the provision of unemployment insurance. The second essay examines how Social Security retirement income influences the decision of late-career workers to participate in the labor market. All three essays emphasize that the willingness of workers to pursue a job in the labor market relies upon the social insurance available to them outside of employment. Theoretical models of optimal unemployment insurance predict that the job search and savings behavior of unemployed workers will partially be determined by how long a worker expects to remain unemployed. Empirical evidence suggests, however, that workers often underestimate the duration of their unemployment spell. These biased beliefs about the duration of unemployment among unemployed workers should therefore affect their job search and savings behavior. To date, no reliable data have been used to empirically analyze to what degree biased beliefs would change the behavior of unemployment workers. In the first essay, titled 'Biased Beliefs and Job Search: Implications for Optimal Unemployment Insurance,' I use a novel dataset, the Survey of Unemployed Workers in New Jersey, to evaluate how biased beliefs vary across unemployed workers and how they influence the behavior of those workers. I find that overly-optimistic unemployed workers underestimate the duration of their unemployment, leading them to spend 26 percent less time searching for a job each week than those with a pessimistic bias. I also find that overly-optimistic unemployed workers have over $8,500 less saved at any given point during an unemployment spell. These results suggest that unemployed workers with an optimistic bias would benefit from an information "nudge" that encourages increased search effort and could lead to faster reemployment. The first essay demonstrates how workers respond to the presence of social insurance when they are still focused on rejoining the labor market. That is, it provides evidence on the intensive margin. However, it does not say anything about how it would influence a worker's desire to participate in the labor market at all, on the extensive margin. In the second essay, 'Do Late-Career Wages Boost Social Security More for Women than Men?,' Matthew Rutledge and I estimate the incentives for older workers to continue working during their retirement-age years when they could be collecting Social Security. Any worker who delays claiming Social Security receives a larger monthly benefit because of the actuarial adjustment. Some claimants - particularly women, who are more likely to take time out of the labor force early in their careers - can further increase their benefits if the extra years of work raise their career average earnings by displacing lower-earning years. This essay uses the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) linked to earnings records to quantify the impact of women's late-career earnings on Social Security benefits relative to men's. The essay finds that the average gain in Social Security retirement benefits from working one additional year raises women's monthly benefits by 8.6 percent, of which 1.6 percent is from late-career earnings. These results suggest that, especially among women, there are additional benefits to delaying claiming and further increasing the retirement age. Through both of the first two chapters, the parameters outlining the social insurance program were held constant. In reality, the rules of a social insurance program can change over time. Motivated by this possibility, my third chapter, 'The Impact of Unemployment Insurance Extensions on Worker Job-Search Behavior,' explores how reservation wages and job search effort respond to extensions of unemployment insurance. Current economic theory predicts that reservation wages should rise following an extension of potential benefit duration, while search effort should fall. Previous papers in this literature focus on the end result, which is that UI extensions result in prolonged unemployment spells. Using the Survey of Unemployed Workers in New Jersey, and the UI benefit extension in the United States in November 2009, this paper identifies the worker behaviors that lead to prolonged unemployment durations. Employing hypothesis testing and event study analysis, this study shows there are lagged, significant increases in reservation wages and decreases in search effort following the benefit extension. The results suggest that an alternative model of job search is needed. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.