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...
