Should unemployment insurance cover partial unemployment?

Susanne Ek

IZA World of Labor, 2015, No 199, 199

Abstract: A considerable share of the labor force consists of underemployed part-time workers: employed workers who, for various reasons, are unable to work as much as they would like to. Offering unemployment benefits to part-time unemployed workers is controversial. On the one hand, such benefits can strengthen incentives to take a part-time job rather than remain fully unemployed, thus raising the probability of obtaining at least some employment. On the other hand, these benefits weaken incentives for part-time workers to look for full-time employment. It is also difficult to distinguish people who work part-time by choice from those who do so involuntarily.

Keywords: active labor market policies; part-time work; part-time unemployment; partial unemployment insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://wol.iza.org/articles/should-unemployment-in ... l-unemployment-1.pdf (application/pdf)
http://wol.iza.org/articles/should-unemployment-in ... partial-unemployment (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Should unemployment insurance cover partial unemployment? (2022)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izawol:journl:y:2015:n:199

Access Statistics for this article

IZA World of Labor is currently edited by Pierre Cahuc

More articles in IZA World of Labor from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) ().