Labor Market Cycles and Unemployment Insurance Eligibility

Miquel Faig and Min Zhang

Working Papers from University of Toronto, Department of Economics

Abstract: If entitlement to Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits must be earned with employment, generous UI is an additional benefit to an employment relationship, so it promotes job creation. If individuals are risk neutral, UI is fairly priced, and the UI system prevents moral-hazard, the generosity of UI has no effect on unemployment. As with Ricardian Equivalence, this result should be useful to pinpoint the effects of UI to violation of its premises. In itself, the endogenous entitlement of UI benefits does not resolve if the Mortensen-Pissarides model is able to generate realistic cycles. However, it brings some insights into this debate: The widespread concern in the design of UI systems to minimize moral-hazard unemployment only makes sense if workers have sufficiently high values of leisure (80 percent of labor productivity in our baseline calculation for the United States). Also, the fact that the generosity of UI has potentially a small effect on unemployment reconciles a high response of unemployment to changes in labor productivity with a small response to changes in UI benefits.

Keywords: Search; Matching; UI Eligibility; Business Cycles; Labor Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 51 pages
Date: 2010-05-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-dge, nep-ias, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Labor Market Cycles and Unemployment Insurance Eligibility (2008)
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