Part-Time Unemployment and Optimal Unemployment Insurance

Susanne Ek and Bertil Holmlund ()

No 3370, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: A significant fraction of the labor force consists of employed workers who are part-time unemployed (underemployed) in the sense that they are unable to work as much as they prefer. This paper develops a search and matching model to study the design of optimal unemployment insurance in an economy with unemployment as well as part-time unemployment. Part-time unemployment provides income insurance and serves as a stepping stone to full-time jobs. Unemployment benefits for part-timers increase the outflow from unemployment to part-time work but reduce the outflow from part-time work to fulltime employment. We examine the optimal structure of benefits for unemployed and underemployed workers. The results indicate non-negligible welfare gains associated with time limits for unemployment benefits as well as for part-time benefits. The welfare gains from optimal UI are larger when wages are fixed than when they are flexible.

Keywords: job search; part-time unemployment; unemployment insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J64 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3370.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
Journal Article: Part-time unemployment and optimal unemployment insurance (2015)
Working Paper: Part-Time Unemployment and Optimal Unemployment Insurance (2011)
Working Paper: Part-Time Unemployment and Optimal Unemployment Insurance (2011)
Working Paper: Part-Time Unemployment and Optimal Unemployment Insurance (2011)
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:ces:ceswps:_3370

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().