Unemployment Insurance: Isn't Marriage Enough?

Stephane Pallage, Michel Robe () and Christian Zimmermann ()

No 697, 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: Through marriage, individuals can share some risks that would otherwise be uninsurable. In this paper, we ask how much idiosyncratic income risk can be diversified away through marriage contracts alone versus how much risk there remains for public unemployment insurance programs to alleviate. We tackle this question in a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous agents and intra-household negociation. Individuals differ in gender, accumulated wealth, as well as employment and marriage status. Marriage, divorce, job acceptance and savings decisions are endogenous. Other labor market outcomes are modelled as an exogenous stochastic process matching key US data. The generosity of the unemployment insurance program is determined by voting. We run a series of experiments to contrast the optimal public insurance schemes in worlds with and without marriage possibilities. The impact of moral hazard in the employment market is assessed.

Keywords: marriage; unemployment insurance; incomplete markets; moral hazard; intra-household negociation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 D7 D58 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-12-03

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

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

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2006 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics
Address: Society for Economic Dynamics Anne Stubing CV Starr Center for Applied Economics 269 Mercer Street, Room 303 New York University New York, NY 10003
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().