Bertil Holmlund

Unemployment Insurance in Theory and Practice

A hallmark of modern labor economics is the close interplay between the development of theory, data sources and econometric testing. The evolution of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance provides a good illustration. New theoretical approaches, in particular job-search theory, have inspired a large amount of empirical research, some of it methodologically innovative and most of it highly relevant for economic policy. The paper presents a broad survey and an assessment of the economic analysis of unemployment insurance as it has evolved since the 1970s.

Improving Incentives in Unemployment Insurance: A Review of Recent Research

This paper provides a review of the recent literature on how incentives in unemployment insurance (UI) can be improved. We are particularly concerned with three instruments, viz. the duration of benefit payments (or more generally the time sequencing of benefits), monitoring in conjunction with sanctions, and workfare. Our reading of the theoretical literature is that the case for imposing a penalty on less active job search is fairly solid. A growing number of empirical studies, including randomized experiments, are in line with this conclusion.

Unemployment duration, unemployment benefits, and labor market programs in Sweden

Standard search theory and some empirical evidence suggest that an unemployed individuals probability of entering employment increases as they approach the time when unemployment benefits are due to expire. This pattern may not carry over to countries such as Sweden, where labour market programmes are targeted at the long-term unemployed at risk of benefit exhaustion. This paper examines movements out of unemployment using data on unemployed individuals in Sweden. A semi-parametric competing risks model for transitions to employment, labour market programmes and non-participation is estimated. There is some evidence that the exit rate from unemployment to employment increases as benefit exhaustion is approached.

Was Adam Smith Right after All? Another Test of the Theory of Compensating Wage Differentials

Past attempts to estimate the magnitude of compensating wage differentials have been hindered by the biasing effects of omitted variables and measurement error. We argue that a wage change formulation, estimated with panel data that contain worker reports of their own job characteristics, reduces both of these biases. Our empirical results, based on a large panel of workers in Sweden, confirm these conjectures by giving many more reasonable coefficient estimates for a wage change equation than for a wage level formulation.

Optimal Unemployment Insurance in Search Equilibrium

Should unemployment compensation be paid indefinitely at a fixed rate or should it decline (or increase) over a worker’s unemployment spell? We examine these issues using an equilibrium model of search unemployment. The model features worker-firm bargaining over wages, free entry of new jobs, and endogenous search effort among the unemployed. The main result is that an optimal insurance program implies a declining sequence of unemployment compensation over the spell of unemployment. Numerical calibrations of the model suggest that there are non-trivial welfare gains associated with switching from an optimal uniform benefit structure to an optimally differentiated system.

Insider effects in wage determination: Evidence from five countries

Abstract The paper attempts to shed new light on the determinants of industry wages by a cross-country comparison of wage setting relationships, making use of comprehensive and consistent panel data on industries from the early 1960s to the mid-1980s. The empirical analysis involves estimations of identically specified industry wage equations for each of five countries: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Germany and the United States. A key finding is that industry wages in the U.S. are the most responsive to sectoral price and productivity changes. By contrast, industry wages in the Nordic countries are largely unaffected by sectoral conditions. The results cast doubt on the competitive model as an accurate characterization of wage setting under decentralization.

Temporary Work in Turbulent Times: The Swedish Experience

Sweden has experienced a substantial increase in temporary work over the 1990s, with most of the rise occurring during a severe macroeconomic recession with mass unemployment. By the early 1990s, workers on fixed-term contracts accounted for 10 percent of the number of employees; by the end of the decade they accounted for 16 percent. The paper presents the Swedish institutional setting, documents basic stylised facts about fixed-term contracts, and discusses the causes of their increased prevalence. Our analysis reveals that open-ended and temporary employment exhibit strikingly different cyclical behaviour with temporary employment being more volatile. A recession is associated with an initial decline in temporary employment followed by a sharp rise from the trough to the end of the recession. We argue that the severe recession of the 1990s is a major factor behind the rise in temporary work in Sweden. Adverse macroeconomic conditions make firms more prone to offer fixed-term contracts and workers more willing to accept them.

Tax evasion and self-employment in a high-tax country: evidence from Sweden

Self-employed individuals have arguably greater opportunities than wage earners to underreport their incomes. This article uses recent Swedish income and expenditure data to examine the extent of underreporting of income among self-employed individuals. A key hypothesis is that underreporting of incomes among the self-employed would be visible in the data as ‘excess food consumption’, for a given level of observed income. Our results confirm the underreporting hypothesis. In particular, we estimate that households with at least one self-employed member underreport their total incomes by around 30%. Under-reporting appears to be much more prevalent among self-employed people with unincorporated businesses as among those with incorporated businesses.

Do Benefit Cuts Boost Job Findings? Swedish Evidence from the 1990s

In June 1995, the Swedish parliament decided to cut the replacement rate in unemployment insurance from 80 percent to 75 percent, a change that took effect on January 1, 1996. This paper examines how this change affected job finding rates among unemployed insured individuals. To identify the effect of the policy we exploit a quasi-experimental feature of the benefit cut: only a fraction of the unemployed was affected by the reduction in replacement rates. We compare the evolution of job finding rates before and after the reform among those affected and those not affected. Our estimates suggest that the reform caused an increase in the transition rate of roughly 10 percent. There is also evidence of anticipatory behavior among the unemployed; the effects of the reform seem to operate several months before its actual implementation in January 1996.

Optimal Unemployment Insurance with Monitoring and Sanctions

This paper analyzes the design of optimal unemployment insurance in a search equilibrium framework where search effort among the unemployed is not perfectly observable. We examine to what extent the optimal policy involves monitoring of search effort and benefit sanctions if observed search is deemed insufficient. We find that introducing monitoring and sanctions represents a welfare improvement for reasonable estimates of monitoring costs; this conclusion holds both relative to a system featuring indefinite payments of benefits and a system with a time limit on unemployment benefit receipt. The optimal sanction rates implied by our calibrated model are much higher than the sanction rates typically observed in European labor markets.