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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
Stochastic optimal growth with a non-compact state space
This paper studies the stability of a stochastic optimal growth economy introduced by Brock and Mirman [J. Econ. Theory 4 (1972)] by utilizing stochastic monotonicity in a dynamic system. The construction of two boundary distributions leads to a new method of studying systems with non-compact state space. The paper shows the existence of a unique invariant distribution. It also shows the equivalence between the stability and the uniqueness of the invariant distribution in this dynamic system.
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.
Briefing
The Differing Effects of the Business Cycle on Small and Large Banks
Small banks and large banks respond differently to business cycle fluctuations. The average net interest margin (NIM) at large banks is negatively correlated with the business cycle, while the average NIM at small banks is positively correlated with the business cycle. In a popular view, small banks are different from large banks because of their close relationships with their borrowers. But a decomposition of the cyclical properties of NIM into the asset and liability sides of the balance sheet suggests that small banks' procyclical NIM is due to their ability to keep funding costs less ...
Working Paper
Optimal auditing and insurance in a dynamic model of tax compliance
We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer?s income in a dynamic principal- agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can underreport his true income and evade his taxes. With a constant absolute risk-aversion utility function and a costly and imperfect auditing technology, we show that the optimal auditing mechanism in our model consists of cycles. Within each cycle, a low-income taxpayer is initially unaudited, but if the duration of ...
Working Paper
Optimal Liquidity Regulation With Shadow Banking
We study the impact of shadow banking on optimal liquidity regulations in a Diamond-Dybvig maturity mismatch environment. A pecuniary externality arising out of the banks' access to private retrade renders competitive equilibrium inefficient. Shadow banking provides an outside option for banks, which adds a new constraint in the mechanism design problem that determines the optimal allocation. A tax on illiquid assets and a subsidy to the liquid asset similar to the payment of interest on reserves (IOR) constitute an optimal liquidity regulation policy in this economy. During expansions, i.e., ...
Journal Article
Saving for Retirement with Job Loss Risk
This article studies a tractable theoretical model of optimal consumption and saving decisions with endogenous retirement. Particular attention is paid to the impact of an increase in the risk of losing one?s job on the optimal path of consumption and wealth accumulation. Even if one does not actually lose their job, an increase in the risk of a job loss is by itself sufficient to cause lower consumption, higher saving, and, through faster retirement, lower labor supply.
Journal Article
Optimal Institutions in Economies with Private Information: Exclusive Contracts, Taxes, and Bankruptcy Law
In economies with private information, it is typically optimal to prohibit or otherwise discourage a subset of trades that individual agents want to enter. Economists often refer to such optimal distortions as wedges. In this article, we use a simple private-information Mirrleesian economy to, first, show examples of these wedges and, second, discuss institutions that may be used to implement them in practice. We discuss and compare three such institutions: exclusive contracts, taxes, and bankruptcy law. Our analysis underscores the multiplicity of possible implementations and, therefore, the ...
Journal Article
Unemployment benefits: how much money goes unclaimed?
Not all who are eligible to receive unemployment benefits actually collect them.