Labor market insurance policies in the twenty-first century

Tito Boeri and Pierre Cahuc

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis was a stress test for unemployment insurance schemes as it involved a sudden and unexpected shutdown of a very large set of activities. This forced countries to introduce, often from scratch, income support schemes for workers under new forms of employment and for the self-employed. There was also a considerable expansion of short-time work schemes. As we move past this crisis, labor markets are likely to be characterized by substantial labor reallocation, and major innovations in labor market policy will be required to smooth consumption of workers involved in this reallocation. We survey the large body of research on schemes complementary to unemployment insurance to reduce the costs of reallocation. We focus on short-time work, partial unemployment insurance, and wage insurance and compare their properties to those of standard unemployment benefits. Next we present the main empirical results on the effects of wage insurance, partial unemployment insurance, and short-time work. In the final section we discuss directions for further research.

Keywords: partial unemployment insurance; short-time work; wage insurance; Covid-19; coronavirus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H50 J60 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2023-09-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ltv
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in Annual Review of Economics, 13, September, 2023, 15(1). ISSN: 1941-1383

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/123549/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Labor Market Insurance Policies in the Twenty-First Century (2023)
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:ehl:lserod:123549

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().