How Changes in Financial Incentives Affect the Duration of Unemployment
43 Pages Posted: 3 Dec 2004
There are 2 versions of this paper
How Changes in Financial Incentives Affect the Duration of Unemployment
How Changes in Financial Incentives Affect the Duration of Unemployment
Date Written: November 2004
Abstract
This paper studies how changes in the two key parameters of unemployment insurance - the benefit replacement rate (RR) and the potential duration of benefits (PBD) - affect the duration of unemployment. In 1989, the Austrian government made unemployment insurance more generous by changing, simultaneously, the maximum duration of regular unemployment benefits and the earnings replacement ratio. We find that increasing the replacement ratio has much weaker disincentive effects than increasing the maximum duration of benefits. We use these results to split up the total costs to unemployment insurance funds into costs due to changes in the unemployment insurance system and costs due to behavioral responses of unemployed workers. Results indicate that costs due to behavioral responses are substantial.
Keywords: maximum benefit duration, replacement rate, unemployment duration, unemployment insurance, policy change
JEL Classification: C41, J64, J65
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
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