Effciency and Equality in a Simple Model of Unemployment Insurance

Andrew Atkeson and Robert E. Lucas

No 4381, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper describes the efficient allocation of consumption and work effort in an economy in which workers face idiosyncratic employment risk and considerations of moral hazard prevent full insurance. We impose a lower bound on the expected discounted utility that can be assigned to any agent from any date onward, and show, with this feature added, that the efficient unemployment insurance scheme induces an invariant cross sectional distribution of individual entitlements to utility. The paper thus provides a simple prototype model suited to the study of the normative question: what is the tradeoff between equality and efficiency in resource allocation?

Date: 1993-06
Note: EFG
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4381.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4381

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4381
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().