Data and Code for: Labor Market Responses to Unemployment Insurance: The Role of Heterogeneity

Principal Investigator(s): View help for Principal Investigator(s) Serdar Birinci, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; Kurt See, Bank of Canada

Version: View help for Version V1

Name	File Type	Size	Last Modified
Replication_Package			08/02/2022 05:33:PM

Project Citation:

Birinci, Serdar, and See, Kurt . Data and Code for: Labor Market Responses to Unemployment Insurance: The Role of Heterogeneity. Nashville, TN: American Economic Association [publisher], 2023. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2023-06-23. https://doi.org/10.3886/E170261V1

Project Description

Summary: We document considerable scope of heterogeneity within the unemployed, especially when the unemployed are divided along eligibility and receipt of unemployment insurance (UI). We study the implications of this heterogeneity on UI’s insurance-incentive trade-off using a heterogeneous-agent job-search model capable of matching the wealth and income differences that distinguish UI recipients from non-recipients. Insurance benefits are larger for UI recipients who are predominantly wealth-poor. Meanwhile, incentive costs are non-monotonic in wealth because the poorest individuals, who value employment, exhibit weak responses. Differential elasticities imply that accounting for the composition of recipients is material to the evaluation of UI's insurance-incentive trade-off.

Scope of Project

Subject Terms: Unemployment insurance; Fiscal policy; Job search

JEL Classification:
      E24 Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
      H31 Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents: Household
      J64 Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
      J65 Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings

Geographic Coverage: United States

Time Period(s): 1996 – 2016

Universe: Survey respondents who are age 25 to 65 and who do not own a business

Data Type(s): survey data

Methodology

Data Source: Survey of Income and Program Participation, Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Current Population Survey, Federal Reserve Economic Data, Department of Labor UI State Laws

Unit(s) of Observation: Individual

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Published Versions

V1 [2023-06-23]

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