Interpreting Recent Quasi-experimental Evidence on the Effects of Unemployment Benefit Extensions PDF Download
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Author: Marcus Hagedorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor market
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Book Description
We critically review recent methodological and empirical contributions aiming to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effects of unemployment benefit extensions on the labor market and attempt to reconcile their apparently disparate findings. We describe two key challenges facing these studies -- the endogeneity of benefit durations to labor market conditions and isolating true effects of actual policies from agents' responses to expectations of future policy changes. Marinescu (2015) employs a methodology that does not attempt to address these challenges. A more innovative approach in Coglianese (2015) and Chodorow-Reich and Karabarbounis (2016) attempts to overcome these challenges by exploiting a sampling error in unemployment rates as an exogenous variation. Unfortunately, we find that this approach falls prey to the very problems it aims to overcome and it appears unlikely that the fundamental bias at the core of this approach can be overcome. We find more promising the approach based on unexpected policy changes as in the recent contributions by Johnston and Mas (2015) and Hagedorn, Manovskii and Mitman (2015). This approach by design addresses the problem of benefit endogeneity. It does not, however, fully address the effects of expectations and generally yields a lower bound on the actual effects of policies.
Author: Marcus Hagedorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor market
Languages : en
Pages : 24
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Book Description
We critically review recent methodological and empirical contributions aiming to provide a comprehensive assessment of the effects of unemployment benefit extensions on the labor market and attempt to reconcile their apparently disparate findings. We describe two key challenges facing these studies -- the endogeneity of benefit durations to labor market conditions and isolating true effects of actual policies from agents' responses to expectations of future policy changes. Marinescu (2015) employs a methodology that does not attempt to address these challenges. A more innovative approach in Coglianese (2015) and Chodorow-Reich and Karabarbounis (2016) attempts to overcome these challenges by exploiting a sampling error in unemployment rates as an exogenous variation. Unfortunately, we find that this approach falls prey to the very problems it aims to overcome and it appears unlikely that the fundamental bias at the core of this approach can be overcome. We find more promising the approach based on unexpected policy changes as in the recent contributions by Johnston and Mas (2015) and Hagedorn, Manovskii and Mitman (2015). This approach by design addresses the problem of benefit endogeneity. It does not, however, fully address the effects of expectations and generally yields a lower bound on the actual effects of policies.
Author: Marcus Hagedorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Book Description
Author: Klaus-Peter Hellwig
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1513572687
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 35
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Book Description
I use three decades of county-level data to estimate the effects of federal unemployment benefit extensions on economic activity. To overcome the reverse causality coming from the fact that benefit extensions are a function of state unemployment rates, I only use the within-state variation in outcomes to identify treatment effects. Identification rests on a differences-in-differences approach which exploits heterogeneity in county exposure to policy changes. To distinguish demand and supply-side channels, I estimate the model separately for tradable and non-tradable sectors. Finally I use benefit extensions as an instrument to estimate local fiscal multipliers of unemployment benefit transfers. I find (i) that the overall impact of benefit extensions on activity is positive, pointing to strong demand effects; (ii) that, even in tradable sectors, there are no negative supply-side effects from work disincentives; and (iii) a fiscal multiplier estimate of 1.92, similar to estimates in the literature for other types of spending.
Author: Bruce D. Meyer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
This paper examines unemployment duration and the incidence of claims following a 36 percent increase in the maximum weekly benefit in New York State. This benefit increase sharply increased benefits for a large group of claimants, while leaving them unchanged for a large share of claimants who provide a natural comparison group. The New York benefit increase has the special features that it was unexpected and applied to in-progress spells. These features allow the effects on duration to be convincingly separated from effects on incidence. The results show a sharp fall in the hazard of leaving UI that coincides with the increase in benefits. The evidence is also consistent with a substantial effect of the benefit level on the incidence of claims and with this change in incidence biasing duration estimates. The evidence further suggests that, at least in this case, standard methods that identify duration effects through nonlinearities in the benefit schedule are not badly biased.
Author: Henry S. Farber
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 41
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Book Description
In response to the Great Recession, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to an unprecedented 99 weeks in many U.S. states in the 2009-2012 period. We use matched monthly data from the CPS to exploit variation in the timing and size of the UI benefit extensions across states to estimate the overall impact of these extensions on individual exit from unemployment, and we compare the estimated impact with that for the prior extension of benefits during the much milder downturn in the early 2000s. In both periods, we find a small but statistically significant reduction in the unemployment exit rate and a small increase in the expected duration of unemployment. The effects on exits and duration are primarily due to a reduction in exits from the labor force rather than to a decrease in exits to employment (the job finding rate). Although the overall effect of UI extensions on exit from unemployment is small, it implies a substantial effect of extended benefits on the steady-state share of unemployment in the cross-section that is long-term.
Author: Johannes F. Schmieder
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Unemployment insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 48
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Book Description
The Great Recession has renewed interest in Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs around the world. At the same time, there have been important advances in both theory and measurement of UI. In this paper, we first use the theory to present a unified treatment of the welfare effects of UI benefit levels and durations and derive convenient expressions of the disincentive effect of UI. We then discuss recent estimates of the effect of UI benefit levels and durations on labor supply based, to a large extent, on high-quality research designs and administrative data. We relate these estimates directly to the sufficient statistics identified by the model. We also discuss several active and open areas of research on UI. These include the effect of UI on aggregate labor market outcomes, the effect of UI on job outcomes, the long-term effects of UI, the effects of UI under non-standard behavioral assumptions, and the interactions of UI with other programs. While our review of the new experimental estimates confirms the range of negative labor supply effects of the previous literature, we show based on the model that these estimates are imperfect proxies for the actual disincentive effects. We also isolate several important areas in need for additional research, including estimates of the social value of UI as well as the effects of UI in less-developed countries.
Author: Shigeru Fujita (Economist)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Unemployment
Languages : en
Pages : 17
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Book Description
Using the monthly CPS, the author estimates unemployment-to-employment (UE) transition rates and unemployment-to-inactivity (UN) transition rates by unemployment duration for male workers. When estimated for the period of 2004-2007, during which no extended benefits are available, both of the transition-rate profiles show clear patterns consistent with the expiration of regular benefits at 26 weeks. These patterns largely disappear in the profiles for the period of 2009-2010, during which large-scale extensions have become available. The author conducts counterfactual experiments in which the estimated profiles for 2009-2010 are replaced by the hypothetical profiles inferred from the ones for 2004-2007. The results indicate that the benefit extensions in recent years have raised male workers' unemployment rate by 0.9-1.7 percentage points. Roughly 50-60 percent of the total increase is attributed to the effects on UE transition rates and the remaining part is accounted for by the effects on UN transition rates.
Author: Alexey Gorn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business cycles
Languages : en
Pages : 70
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Book Description
We study the stabilizing role of unemployment benefit extensions. We develop a tractable quantitative model with heterogeneous agents, search frictions, and nominal rigidities. The model allows for both a stabilizing aggregate demand channel and a destabilizing labor market channel of unemployment insurance. We characterize analytically the workings of each channel. Stabilizing aggregate demand effects marginally prevail in the U.S. economy and the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession played a limited role for unemployment dynamics. Instead, unemployment from the model tracks actual unemployment with a combination of labor market shocks and a shock to the consumers' borrowing capacity.
Author: Matija Vodopivec
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
The paper analyses the effects of a 2011 increase in the unemployment benefit replacement rate on the job-finding rate of Slovenian benefit recipients. Using registry data on the universe of Slovenian unemployment benefit recipients, we exploit legislative changes that selectively increased the replacement rates for certain groups of workers while leaving them unchanged for others. Applying this quasi-experimental approach, we find that increasing the replacement rate significantly decreased the hazard rate of the transition from unemployment to employment, with an implied elasticity of the hazard rate with respect to benefit replacement rate being 0.7 to 0.9. The results also show that the increase of the unemployment benefit replacement rate does not affect the job-finding probability of jobseekers whose reason for unemployment is employer exit, and that the effects of the increase of replacement rate are present only upon exit to employment and not to inactivity.
Author: Andreas Pollak
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161493041
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
Designing a good unemployment insurance scheme is a delicate matter. In a system with no or little insurance, households may be subject to a high income risk, whereas excessively generous unemployment insurance systems are known to lead to high unemployment rates and are costly both from a fiscal perspective and for society as a whole. Andreas Pollak investigates what an optimal unemployment insurance system would look like, i.e. a system that constitutes the best possible compromise between income security and incentives to work. Using theoretical economic models and complex numerical simulations, he studies the effects of benefit levels and payment durations on unemployment and welfare. As the models allow for considerable heterogeneity of households, including a history-dependent labor productivity, it is possible to analyze how certain policies affect individuals in a specific age, wealth or skill group. The most important aspect of an unemployment insurance system turns out to be the benefits paid to the long-term unemployed. If this parameter is chosen too high, a large number of households may get caught in a long spell of unemployment with little chance of finding work again. Based on the predictions in these models, the so-called "Hartz IV" labor market reform recently adopted in Germany should have highly favorable effects on the unemployment rates and welfare in the long run.
