This paper provides a simple, yet robust framework to evaluate the time profile of benefits paid during an unemployment spell. We derive sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the marginal insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits paid at different times during a spell. Our approach allows us to revisit separate arguments for inclining or declining profiles put forward in the theoretical literature and to identify welfare-improving changes in the benefit profile that account for all relevant arguments jointly. For the empirical implementation, we use administrative data on unemployment, linked to data on consumption, income and wealth in Sweden. First, we exploit duration-dependent kinks in the replacement rate and find that, if anything, the moral hazard cost of benefits is larger when paid earlier in the spell. Second, we find that the drop in consumption affecting the insurance value of benefits is large from the start of the spell, but further increases throughout the spell. In trading off insurance and incentives, our analysis suggests that the flat benefit profile in Sweden has been too generous overall. However, both from the insurance and the incentives side, we find no evidence to support the introduction of a declining tilt in the profile.Keywords: Unemployment, Dynamic Policy, Sufficient Statistics, Consumption Smoothing JEL codes: H20, J64 * We thank Tony Atkinson, Richard Blundell, Raj Chetty, Liran Einav, Hugo Hopenhayn, Philipp Kircher, Henrik Kleven, Alan Manning, Arash Nekoei, Nicola Pavoni, Torsten Persson, Jean-Marc Robin, Emmanuel Saez, Florian Scheuer, Robert Shimer, Frans Spinnewyn, Ivan Werning, Gabriel Zucman and seminar participants at the NBER PF Spring Meeting, SED Warsaw, EEA Mannheim, DIW Berlin, Kiel, Zurich, Helsinki, Stanford, Leuven, Uppsala, IIES, Yale, IFS, Wharton, Sciences Po, UCLA, Sussex, Berkeley, MIT, Columbia, LMU and LSE for helpful discussions and suggestions. We also thank Iain Bamford, Albert Brue-Perez, Jack Fisher, Benjamin Hartung, Panos Mavrokonstantis and Yannick Schindler for excellent research assistance. We acknowledge financial support from the ERC (grant #716485 and #716485), the Sloan foundation (NBER grant #22-2382-15-1-33-003), STICERD and the CEP. 1The key objective of social insurance programs is to provide insurance against adverse events while maintaining incentives. The impact of these adverse events is dynamic and so are the insurance value and incentive cost of social protection against these events. As a consequence, the design of social insurance policies tends to be dynamic as well, specifying a schedule of benefits and taxes that are time-dependent. In the context of unemployment insurance (UI), the UI policy specifies a full benefit profile designed to balance incentives and insurance throughout the unemployment spell. Solving this dynamic problem can prove daunting, especially when adding important features of unemployment dynamics involving selection and non-stationarities. Indeed, there seems to be little conse...
Contact CEH NORA team at noraceh@ceh.ac.ukThe NERC and CEH trademarks and logos ('the Trademarks') are registered trademarks of NERC in the UK and other countries, and may not be used without the prior written consent of the Trademark owner. Although it is claimed that over 95% of scientists in evolution and ecology believe data should be 131 publicly archived [1], mandatory public data archiving (PDA) is raising many issues in the scientific 132 community as evidenced by debates on websites, in blogs and publications [2-10]. Here we focus on the 133 perspective from long-term individual-based studies of wild populations that often span several 134 decades. 135Short and long-term ecological studies differ in several important aspects. For example, in the former, 136 data tend to be collected over a short period of time for one or two papers and once published the data 137 in these papers become less valuable to the collector and can be more useful to others with different 138 perspectives or analytical skills. In contrast, in studies that have followed individuals over their lifetimes, 139 a lot of crucial information is assessed from derived metrics (e.g. survival, lifetime reproductive success) 140 that can only be estimated after many years of fieldwork. Therefore, much value can remain in the 141 primary data even after some of the initial questions are answered. 142Long-term studies are rare and have great scientific value since many important questions in ecology 143 and evolutionary biology can only be answered from the life histories of recognizable individuals [11]. A 144 detailed analysis of the importance of individual-based studies has been documented elsewhere [11], 145 but a few examples are given in Box 1. 146While group discussions and blog posts on PDA related issues have been flourishing, little is formally 147 known and published about the position and concerns of people collecting long-term data. To fill this 148 gap, a survey was conducted to learn their perspectives, and if current data requirements were 149 perceived as problematic, to identify potential alternative data-sharing policies that could be acceptable 150 to the journals, the scientific community and the Principal investigators. 151 152 The survey 153To obtain the opinions of scientists with individual-based longitudinal data, a worldwide survey was sent 154 to 146 PIs of long-term research projects. Responses were received from 73 PIs working on 59 bird 155 studies, 13 mammalian studies and 1 plant study. The 92 projects (some PIs have several projects) range 156 in duration from 5 to 68 years ( Figure 1), with 55 percent collecting data for more than 30 years. Thirty-157 five percent of researchers were required to archive data used in a publication by their current funding 158 agency and 19% by their institution. Eight researchers were required to deposit data by both; therefore 159 59% were not required to archive their data. There was diversity of opinion among PIs about data 160 archiving, but some strong points of consens...
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu On normal days, the temperature decreases with altitude, allowing air pollutants to rise and disperse. During inversion episodes, a warmer air layer at higher altitude traps pollutants close to the ground. We show how readily available NASA satellite data on vertical temperature profiles can be used to measure inversion episodes on a global scale with high spatial and temporal resolution. Then, we link inversion episode data to ground level pollution monitors and to daily in-and outpatient records for the universe of children in Sweden during a six-year period to provide instrumental variable estimates of the effects of air quality on children's health. The IV estimates show that the respiratory illness health care visit rate increases by 8 percent for each 10 μm/m³ increase in PM10; an estimate four times higher than conventional estimates. Importantly, by linking the health care data to detailed records of parental background characteristics, we show that children from low-income households suffer significantly more from air pollution than children from high income households. Finally, we provide evidence on the importance of several mechanisms that could contribute to the difference in the impact of air pollution across children in rich and poor households. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SJEL Classification: Q53, I1, I3, J24
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author. We utilize a large-scale randomized social experiment to identify how coworkers affect each other's effort as measured by work absence. The experiment altered the work absence incentives for half of all employees living in Göteborg, Sweden. Using administrative data we are able to recover the treatment status of all workers in more than 3,000 workplaces. We first document that employees in workplaces with a high proportion treated coworkers increase their own absence level significantly. We then examine the heterogeneity of the treatment effect in order to explore what mechanisms are underlying the peer effect. While a strong effect of having a high proportion of treated coworkers is found for the nontreated workers, no significant effects are found for the treated workers. These results suggest that pure altruistic social preferences can be ruled out as the main motivator for the behaviour of a nonnegligible proportion of the employees in our sample.JEL Classification: J24
No abstract
Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Abstract This paper utilizes a Swedish alcohol policy experiment conducted in the late 1960s to identify the impact of prenatal alcohol exposure on educational attainments and labor market outcomes. The experiment started in November 1967 and was prematurely discontinued in July 1968 due to a sharp increase in alcohol consumption in the experimental regions, particularly among youths. Using a difference-in-difference-indifferences estimation strategy we find that around the age of 30 the cohort in utero during the experiment has substantially reduced educational attainments, lower earnings and higher welfare dependency rates compared to the surrounding cohorts. The results indicate that investments in early-life health have far-reaching effects on economic outcomes in later life. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.