Search Results
Discussion Paper
Wage Insurance: A Potential Policy for Displaced Workers
Despite the existing safety net, worker displacement continues to have severe consequences that motivate the consideration of new social insurance programs. Wage insurance is a novel policy that temporarily provides additional income to workers who lose their job and become re-employed at a lower wage. In this post, we draw on evidence from our recent working paper analyzing the effects of a U.S. wage insurance program on worker earnings and employment outcomes. Among workers displaced by international trade, we find that eligibility for wage insurance increased the probability of employment ...
Working Paper
Business Cycle Fluctuations in Mirrlees Economies: The Case of i.i.d. Shocks
I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about the i.i.d. realizations of their value of leisure. For the case of logarithmic preferences I provide an analytical characterization of the solution to the associated mechanism design problem. Moreover, I show a striking irrelevance result: That the stationary behavior of all aggregate variables are exactly the same in the private information economy as in the full information case. Numerical simulations indicate that the irrelevance result approximately holds for more general CRRA preferences.
Working Paper
Who is screened out of social insurance programs by entry barriers? Evidence from consumer bankruptcies
Entry barriers into social insurance programs will be effective screening devices if they cause only those individuals receiving higher benefits from a program to participate in that program. We find evidence for this by using plausibly exogenous variations in travel-related entry costs into the Canadian consumer bankruptcy system. Using detailed balance sheet and travel data, we find that higher travel-related entry costs reduce bankruptcies from individuals with lower financial benefits of bankruptcy (unsecured debt discharged, minus secured assets forgone). When compared across filers, ...
Working Paper
Population aging, labor demand, and the structure of wages
One consequence of demographic change is substantial shifts in the age distribution of the working-age population. As the baby boom generation ages, the usual historical pattern of a high ratio of younger workers relative to older workers has been replaced by a pattern of roughly equal percentages of workers of different ages. One might expect that the increasing relative supply of older workers would lower the wage premium paid for older, more experienced workers. This paper provides strong empirical support for this hypothesis. Econometric estimates imply that the size of one?s birth cohort ...
Working Paper
Old, sick, alone, and poor: a welfare analysis of old-age social insurance programs
Poor health, large acute and long-term care medical expenses, and spousal death are significant drivers of impoverishment among retirees. We document these facts and build a rich, overlapping generations model that reproduces them. We use the model to assess the incentive and welfare effects of Social Security and means-tested social insurance programs such as Medicaid and food stamp programs, for the aged. We find that U.S. means-tested social insurance programs for retirees provide significant welfare benefits for all newborn. Moreover, when means-tested social insurance benefits are of the ...
Working Paper
Optimal Social Insurance and Rising Labor Market Risk
This paper analyzes the optimal response of the social insurance system to a rise in labor market risk. To this end, we develop a tractable macroeconomic model with risk-free physical capital, risky human capital (labor market risk) and unobservable effort choice affecting the distribution of human capital shocks (moral hazard). We show that constrained optimal allocations are simple in the sense that they can be found by solving a static social planner problem. We further show that constrained optimal allocations are the equilibrium allocations of a market economy in which the government ...
Report
Wage Insurance for Displaced Workers
Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We analyze wage insurance in the context of the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program by merging linked employer-employee Census data to TAA petitions and leveraging a discontinuity in eligibility based on worker age. Wage insurance eligibility increases short-run employment probabilities and leads to higher long-run cumulative earnings. We find shorter non-employment durations largely drive increased long-term earnings among workers eligible for wage insurance. Our results are ...
Working Paper
Family and Government Insurance: Wage, Earnings, and Income Risks in the Netherlands and the U.S.
We document new facts about risk in male wages and earnings, household earnings, and pre- and post-tax income in the Netherlands and the United States. We find that, in both countries, earnings display important deviations from the typical assumptions of linearity and normality. Individual-level male wage and earnings risk is relatively high at the beginning and end of the working life, and for those in the lower and upper parts of the income distribution. Hours are the main driver of the negative skewness and, to a lesser extent, the high kurtosis of earnings changes. Even though we find no ...
Report
On the Distribution of the Welfare Losses of Large Recessions
How big are the welfare losses from severe economic downturns, such as the U.S. Great Recession? How are those losses distributed across the population? In this paper we answer these questions using a canonical business cycle model featuring household income and wealth heterogeneity that matches micro data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We document how these losses are distributed across households and how they are affected by social insurance policies. We find that the welfare cost of losing one?s job in a severe recession ranges from 2% of lifetime consumption for the ...