The Potential Duration of Unemployment Benefits and the Duration of Unemployment

Lawrence Katz and Bruce D. Meyer
Additional contact information
Bruce D. Meyer: NBER

Chapter 6 in Issues in Contemporary Economics, 1991, pp 128-156 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Western European countries with relatively generous unemployment insurance (UI) systems (such as Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK) have suffered much larger and more persistent increases in unemployment in the 1980s than has the USA. These differences in West European and US unemployment experience are largely explained by the substantially longer duration of unemployment spells in Europe. Furthermore, much microeconomic evidence indicates that there is a positive relation between the level of UI benefits received and the duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients.2 These observations have generated much interest among both academics (for example, Minford, 1985) and the press (for example The Economist, 14–20 May 1988, p. 69) in the hypothesis that work disincentives arising from generous unemployment insurance (UI) systems have played an important role in high and persistent European unemployment in the 1980s.

Keywords: Unemployment Benefit; Unemployment Insurance; Escape Rate; Reservation Wage; Unemployment Spell (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

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.

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

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:intecp:978-1-349-11576-1_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349115761

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-11576-1_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in International Economic Association Series from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().