Search Results
Working Paper
Unemployment insurance fraud and optimal monitoring
The most prevalent incentive problem in the U.S. unemployment insurance system is that individuals collect unemployment benefits while being gainfully employed. We show how the unemployment insurance authority can efficiently use a combination of tax/subsidy and monitoring to prevent such fraud. The optimal policy monitors the unemployed at fixed intervals. Employment tax is nonmonotonic: it increases between verifications but decreases after a verification. Unemployment benefits are relatively flat between verifications but decrease sharply after a verification.
Working Paper
Comparative Advantage and Moonlighting
The proportion of multiple jobholders (moonlighters) is negatively correlated with productivity (wages) in cross-sectional and time series data, but positively correlated with education. We develop a model of the labor market to understand these seemingly contradictory facts. An income e?ect explains the negative correlation with productivity while a comparative advantage of skilled workers explains the positive correlation with education. We provide empirical evidence of the comparative advantage in CPS data. We calibrate the model to 1994 data on multiple jobholdings, and assess its ability ...
Journal Article
Unemployment insurance fraud
Concealed Earnings fraud accounts for almost two-thirds of the total overpayments due to all fraud.
Journal Article
Who is concealing earnings and still collecting unemployment benefits?
Concealed earnings represent the largest source of fraud in the U.S. unemployment insurance system. Individuals with relatively low earnings constitute a larger fraction of those committing such fraud. High-earnings individuals, however, account for larger dollar amounts of this fraud.
Working Paper
Productivity insurance: the role of unemployment benefits in a multi-sector model
We construct a multi-sector search and matching model where the unemployed receive idiosyncratic productivity shocks that make working in certain sectors more productive than in the others. Agents must decide which sector to search in and face moving costs when leaving their current sector for another. In this environment, unemployment is associated with an additional risk: low future wages if mobility costs preclude search in the appropriate sector. This introduces a new role for unemployment benefits?productivity insurance while unemployed. Analytically, we characterize two competing ...
Journal Article
Unemployment benefits: how much money goes unclaimed?
Not all who are eligible to receive unemployment benefits actually collect them.
Journal Article
Multiple Jobholders
The most likely candidates to hold multiple jobs are not who you would expect.
Journal Article
Unemployment insurance: payments, overpayments and unclaimed benefits
In the U.S. unemployment insurance program, most of the overpayments due to fraud arise from individuals collecting benefits while they are gainfully employed. In addition, the overpayments are dwarfed by payments unclaimed by some who are eligible for unemployment benefits.
Working Paper
Comparative Advantage and Moonlighting
We document three facts: (i) Higher educated workers are more likely to moonlight; (ii) conditional on education, workers with higher wages are less likely to moonlight; and (iii) the prevalence of moonlighting is declining over time for all education groups. We develop an equilibrium model of the labor market to explain these patterns. A dominating income effect explains the negative correlation of moonlighting with productivity in the cross section and the downward trend over time. A higher part-to-full time pay differential for skilled workers (a comparative advantage) explains the ...
Working Paper
Parents, Patience, and Persistence: A Novel Theory of Intergenerational College Attainment
We present a novel theory of intergenerational persistence in college attainment that does not rely on credit constraints, parental transfers and investments, or persistence in innate ability. The gist of our theory is heterogeneity in time preferences, which are endogenous since parents can teach patience to their children before the children make their college decisions. We show, analytically, that the most patient parents are simultaneously more likely to have a college degree and to educate their children to be patient. Persistence follows. We also show that persistence occurs if and only ...