Improving Incentives in Unemployment Insurance: A Review of Recent Research

By Peter Fredriksson, B. Holmlund. Social Science Research Network, 2006

313 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper provides a review of the recent literature on how incentives in unemployment insurance (UI) can be improved. We are particularly concerned with three instruments, viz. the duration of benefit payments (or more generally the time sequencing of benefits), monitoring in conjunction with sanctions, and workfare. Our reading of the theoretical literature is that the case for imposing a penalty on less active job search is fairly solid. A growing number of empirical studies, including randomized experiments, are in line with this conclusion.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/309410e98ffcd58407a8aa99c44bb0b899830eb1

How researchers see this paper

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Peter Fredriksson
2. B. Holmlund
3. Pierre Cahuc
4. Anna Piil Damm
5. Yann Algan
6. Martin Halla
7. M. Lowe

Citations in the corpus

• Safer Ratios, Riskier Portfolios: Banks’ Response to Government Aid (2014, unknown): “See Fredriksson and Holmlund (2006) for a review of this work.”
• Is Short-Time Work a Good Method to Keep Unemployment Down? (2011, background): “…optimal unemployment insurance focused on the optimal level of unemployment benefits, their time profile during the unemployment spell, the impact of sanctions, the consequences of monitoring (Fredriksson and Holmlund, 2006) and the desirability of experience-rating (Blanchard and Tirole, 2009).”
• How Changes in Financial Incentives Affect the Duration of Unemployment (2006, unknown): “The proportional hazard model posits the following specification for the exit rate θ(tu|x) = λ(tu) exp(xβ), where λ(tu) captures the baseline duration dependence of the hazard (in weeks), and x are the observed characteristics of the individuals.(12) The baseline duration dependence is of central in”
• Labor Market Effects of Unemployment Insurance Design (2014, unknown): “These mechanisms can be grouped under three headings: sequencing of benefits, monitoring and benefit sanctions, and workfare (see also Fredriksson and Holmlund, 2006a and 2006b).”
• Optimal unemployment insurance design: Time limits, monitoring, or workfare? (2006, background): “1 Shavell and Weiss (1979) is the seminal paper in this area.”
• Unemployed and their caseworkers: should they be friends or foes? (2010, unknown): “3 Fredriksson and Holmlund (2003), who considered 'optimal' unemployment insurance (UI) systems. They examine three different means of improving the efficiency of UI via passive labour market policy: the duration of benefit payments, monitoring in conjunction with sanctions, and workfare, and find t”
• European unemployment: the evolution of facts and ideas (2006, unknown): “…and unemployment duration, be it the length and time shape of unemployment benefits, or the form of conditionality or training programmes (see, for example, the surveys by Fredriksson and Holmlund, 2003, on unemployment insurance, and by Martin and Grubb, 2001, on active labour market policies).”