The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job?

32 Pages Posted: 7 Feb 2007 Last revised: 25 Sep 2022

See all articles by David Card

David Card

University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Raj Chetty

University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Andrea Weber

Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO); Vienna University of Economics and Business; Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

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Date Written: February 2007

Abstract

In this paper, we review the literature on the "spike" in unemployment exit rates around benefit exhaustion, and present new evidence based on administrative data for a large sample of job losers in Austria. We find that the way unemployment spells are measured has a large effect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion, both in existing studies and in our Austrian data. Spikes are typically much smaller when spell length is defined by the time to next job than when it is defined by the time spent on the unemployment system. In Austria, the exit rate from registered unemployment rises by over 200% at the expiration of benefits, while the hazard rate of re-employment rises by only 20%. The difference between the two measures arises because many individuals leave the unemployment register immediately after their benefits expire without returning to work. The modest spike in re-employment rates implies that most job seekers do not wait until their UI benefits are exhausted to return to work: fewer than 1% of jobless spells have an ending date that is manipulated to coincide with the expiration of UI benefits.

Suggested Citation

Card, David E. and Chetty, Nadarajan (Raj) and Weber, Andrea Michaela and Weber, Andrea Michaela, The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job? (February 2007). NBER Working Paper No. w12893, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=961814

David E. Card (Contact Author)

University of California, Berkeley - Department of Economics ( email )

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Nadarajan (Raj) Chetty

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Andrea Michaela Weber

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