This dissertation consists of three chapters that study issues related to unemployment and retirement decisions of workers.The first chapter examines the impact of additional pension benefits on the retirement timing of low-income female workers in Germany. Using administrative pension insurance records from Germany, it studies the impact of a pension subsidy program on retirement decisions of recipients. The kinked schedule of the policy allows me to identify the causal effect using a regression kink design. The estimation suggests that 100 euros in additional monthly pension benefits induce female recipients to claim pensions earlier by about 10 months. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the ratio of the behavioral cost to the mechanical cost of this subsidy program is 0.3, which is smaller than that of other anti-poverty programs. The second chapter studies the total labor supply effects of Unemployment Insurance (UI) for older workers --- both at the extensive and the intensive margin. It documents sharp bunchings in UI inflows at age discontinuities created by UI eligibility for workers in their 50s. Using a combination of regression discontinuity designs and bunching techniques, we quantify the magnitude of these responses exploiting a variety of thresholds, kinks, and notches induced by the UI and retirement institutions. We estimate the total effect using a dynamic life-cycle structural model. Results suggest that the impact of UI extension on non-employment durations for older workers is almost twice as large as the impact for younger workers. The third chapter examines the impact of receiving written advance notification of layoff on the labor supply of displaced workers by exploring the California Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The California WARN Act, implemented in 2003, expands the requirements of the federal WARN Act. It provides protection to workers in smaller firms and at smaller layoff events. Using the Displaced Worker Supplement to the Current Population Surveys from 1996 to 2018 and a differences-in-difference method, I find that the displaced workers affected by the mini WARN Acts are 3\% more likely to claim unemployment insurance. Conditional on claiming UI, they are less likely to exhaust UI.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/33215 |
| Date | 05 December 2018 |
| Creators | Ye, Han |
| Contributors | Schmieder, Johannes F. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
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