Labor Market Institutions and the Cost of Recessions /

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment, and...

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Autor principal: Krebs, Tom
Altres autors: Scheffel, Martin
Format: Revista
Idioma:English
Publicat: Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2017.
Col·lecció:IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2017/087
Accés en línia:Full text available on IMF
Descripció
Sumari:This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment, and idiosyncratic as well as aggregate labor market risk. The theoretical analysis shows that an increase in JSA and a reduction in UI reduce the output cost of recessions by making the labor market more fluid along the job finding margin and thus making the economy more resilient to macroeconomic shocks. In contarst, the effect of JSA and UI on the welfare cost of recessions is in general ambiguous. The paper also provides a quantitative appliation to the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, which improved JSA (Hartz III reform) and reduced UI (Hartz IV reform). According to the baseline calibration, the two labor market reforms led to a substantial reduction in the output cost of recessions and a moderate reduction in the welfare cost of recessions in Germany.
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Descripció física:1 online resource (85 pages)
Format:Mode of access: Internet
ISSN:1018-5941
Accés:Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students