Do Unemployment Benefit Extensions Explain the Emergence of Jobless Recoveries?

Kurt Mitman and Stanislav Rabinovich ()
Additional contact information
Stanislav Rabinovich: University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

No 12365, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Countercyclical unemployment benefit extensions in the United States act as a propagation mechanism, contributing to both the high persistence of unemployment and its weak correlation with productivity. We show this by modifying an otherwise standard frictional model of the labor market to incorporate a stochastic and state-dependent process for unemployment insurance estimated on US data. Accounting for movements in both productivity and unemployment insurance, our calibrated model is consistent with unemployment dynamics of the past 50 years. In particular, it explains the emergence of jobless recoveries in the 1990's as well as their absence in previous recessions, the low correlation between unemployment and labor productivity, and the apparent shifts in the Beveridge curve following recessions. Next, we embed this mechanism into a medium-scale DSGE model, which we estimate using standard Bayesian methods. Both shocks to unemployment benefits and their systematic component are shown to be important for the sluggish recovery of employment following recessions, in particular the Great Recession, despite the fact that shocks to unemployment benefits account for little of the overall variance decomposition. If we also incorporate other social safety nets, such as food stamps (SNAP), the estimated model assigns an even bigger role to policy in explaining sluggish labor market recovery. We also find that unemployment benefit extensions prevented deflation in the last three recessions, thus acting similarly to a wage markup shock.

Keywords: jobless recoveries; unemployment insurance; business cycles (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 92 pages
Date: 2019-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-ias and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Published - published online in: Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control , 05 September 2024, 104964

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Related works:
Journal Article: Do unemployment benefit extensions explain the emergence of jobless recoveries? (2024)
Working Paper: Do Unemployment Benefit Extensions Explain the Emergence of Jobless Recoveries? (2019)
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