The Value of Unemployment Insurance

Choice Inconsistencies Among the Elderly: Evidence from Plan Choice in the Medicare Part D Program

Camille Landais and Johannes Spinnewijn

The Review of Economic Studies, 2021, vol. 88, issue 6, 3041-3085

Abstract: Due to the absence of unemployment insurance (UI) choices, the traditional approach to estimating the value of UI is to infer it from the observed consumption response to job loss under some assumption on risk preferences. Exploiting the rich data and unique policy context in Sweden, we propose two alternative approaches that relax this assumption and we implement all three methods on the same sample of workers. The first approach considers the difference in marginal propensity to consume (MPC) when unemployed versus employed, which allows to identify the difference in prices to smooth consumption in the respective states. The second approach exploits UI choices embedded in the Swedish UI system in a Revealed Preference approach. While the drop in consumption expenditures is relatively small (13%), we find that the MPC is around 25% higher when unemployed than employed, translating into a marginal value of transfers that is at least % higher when unemployed than employed. This high value of UI is confirmed by our RP estimates and indicates substantial risk aversion given the relatively small drop in consumption expenditures.

Keywords: Unemployment insurance; Consumption smoothing; Revealed preference; MPC; H20; J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Working Paper: The value of unemployment insurance (2021)
Working Paper: The Value of Unemployment Insurance (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:restud:v:88:y:2021:i:6:p:3041-3085.

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