Ny forskning

Här ger vi tips om ny intressant forskning om socialförsäkringen som kommer från de stora internationella forskningsförmedlarna som NBER, SSRN, IZA, CESifo, CEPR m.fl. och tidskrifter och bloggar runt om i världen.

2014-10-24
Cylus J, Glymour MM, Avendano M., NCBI: Do generous unemployment benefit programs reduce suicide rates? A state fixed-effect analysis covering 1968-2008. The recent economic recession has led to increases in suicide, but whether US state unemployment insurance programs ameliorate this association has not been examined. Exploiting US state variations in the generosity of benefit programs between 1968 and 2008, we tested the hypothesis that more generous unemployment benefit programs reduce the impact of economic downturns on suicide. Using state linear fixed-effect models, we found a negative additive interaction between unemployment rates and benefits among the US working-age (20-64 years) population (β = -0.57, 95% confidence interval: -0.86, -0.27; P < 0.001). The finding of a negative additive interaction was robust across multiple model specifications. Our results suggest that the impact of unemployment rates on suicide is offset by the presence of generous state unemployment benefit programs, though estimated effects are small in magnitude.
Richard V Burkhauser et al, IZA: Disability benefit growth and disability reform in the US: lessons from other OECD nations. Unsustainable growth in program costs and beneficiaries, together with a growing recognition that even people with severe impairments can work, led to fundamental disability policy reforms in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Great Britain. In Australia, rapid growth in disability recipiency led to more modest reforms. Here we describe the factors driving unsustainable DI program growth in the U.S., show their similarity to the factors that led to unsustainable growth in these other four OECD countries, and discuss the reforms each country implemented to regain control over their cash transfer disability program. Although each country took a unique path to making and implementing fundamental reforms, shared lessons emerge from their experiences.
2014-10-10
Daniel S. Hamermesh, Daiji Kawaguchi, Jungmin Lee, NBER:  Does Labor Legislation Benefit Workers?  Well-Being after an Hours Reduction. Are workers in modern economies working "too hard"--would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime penalty that had become effective with fewer weekly hours per worker. Using repeated cross sections we show that life satisfaction in both countries may have increased relatively among those workers most likely to have been affected by the legislation.  The same finding is produced using Korean longitudinal data.  In a household model estimated over the Korean cross-section data we find some weak evidence that a reduction in the husband's work hours increased his wife's well-being.  Overall these results are consistent with the claim that legislated reductions in work hours can increase workers' happiness.
Rene Boeheim, Thomas Leoni, IZA:  Firms' Sickness Costs and Workers' Sickness Absences. In many countries, social security insures firms against their workers' sickness absences.  The insurance may create a moral hazard for firms, leading to inefficient monitoring of absences or to an underinvestment in the prevention of absences.       We exploit an administrative threshold in the Austrian social security that defined whether a firm had to pay a deductible for its blue-collar workers sicknesses or not.  The quasi-experimental situation around the threshold provides causal evidence on the extent of moral hazard induced by the deductible.  We apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the differences in the incidences and durations of sicknesses for firms that faced the deductible and those who did not.  We find that the deductible did not lead to different sickness outcomes and conclude that relatively low deductibles have little impact on forms' management of sicknesses.

2014-10-03


Stefan Walter, Maria Glymour, Mauricio Avendano, PLOS:The Health Effects of US Unemployment Insurance Policy: Does Income from Unemployment Benefits Prevent Cardiovascular Disease? Previous studies suggest that unemployment predicts increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, but whether unemployment insurance programs mitigate this risk has not been assessed. Exploiting US state variations in unemployment insurance benefit programs, we tested the hypothesis that more generous benefits reduce CVD risk. States with higher unemployment benefits had lower incidence of CVD, so that a 1% increase in benefits was associated with 18% lower odds of CVD. This association remained after introducing US census regional division fixed effects, but disappeared after introducing state fixed effects. This was consistent with the fact that unemployment was not associated with CVD risk in state-fixed effect models. Although states with more generous unemployment benefits had lower CVD incidence, this appeared to be due to confounding by state-level characteristics. Possible explanations are the lack of short-term effects of unemployment on CVD risk.
Elvira Andersson, Petter Lundborg, Johan Vikström, IZA: Income Receipt and Mortality: Evidence from Swedish Public Sector Employees. In this paper, we study the short-run effect of salary receipt on mortality among Swedish public sector employees. By exploiting variation in pay-days across work-places, we completely control for mortality patterns related to, for example, public holidays and other special days or events coinciding with paydays and for general within-month and within-week mortality patterns. We find a dramatic increase in mortality on the day salaries arrive. The increase is especially pronounced for younger workers and for deaths due to activity-related causes such as heart conditions and strokes. Additionally, the effect is entirely driven by an increase in mortality among low income individuals, who are more likely to experience liquidity constraints. All things considered, our results suggest that an increase in general economic activity upon salary receipt is an important cause of the excess mortality.

 
2014-09-26

Joanne W. Hsu, David A. Matsa, Brian T. Melzer, NBER:  Positive Externalities of Social Insurance: Unemployment Insurance and Consumer Credit. This paper studies the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on consumer credit markets.  Exploiting heterogeneity in UI generosity across U.S. states and over time, we find that UI helps the unemployed avoid defaulting on their mortgage debt.  We estimate that UI expansions during the Great Recession prevented about 1.4 million foreclosures.  Lenders respond to this decline in default risk by expanding credit access and reducing interest rates for low-income households at risk of being laid off.  Our findings call attention to two benefits of unemployment insurance not previously highlighted: reducing deadweight losses from loan default and expanding access to credit.

Horst Entorf, Philip Sieger, IZA: Does the Link between Unemployment and Crime Depend on the Crime Level? A Quantile Regression Approach. Two alternative hypotheses – referred to as opportunity- and stigma-based behavior – suggest that the relationship between unemployment and crime also depends on preexisting local crime levels. In order to analyze conjectured nonlinearities between both variables, we are using quantile regressions applied to German county panel data. While both conventional OLS and quantile regressions confirm the positive link between unemployment and crime for property crimes, results for assault differ with respect to the method of estimation. Whereas conventional mean regressions do not show any significant effect (which would confirm the usual result found for violent crimes in the literature), quantile regression uncovers that size and importance of the relationship are conditional on the crime rate: The partial effect is significantly positive for moderately low and median quantiles of local assault rates.
2014-09-12
John P. Martin, IZA: Activation and Active Labour Market Policies in OECD Countries: Stylized Facts and Evidence on their Effectiveness. Activation policies aimed at getting working-age people off benefits and into work have become a buzzword in labour market policies. Yet they are defined and implemented differently across OECD countries and their success rates vary too. The Great Recession has posed a severe stress test for these policies with some commentators arguing that they are at best "fair weather" policies. This paper sheds light on these issues mainly via the lens of recent OECD research. It presents the stylized facts on how OECD countries have responded to the Great Recession in terms of ramping up their spending on active labour market policies (ALMPs), a key component in any activation strategy. It then reviews the macroeconomic evidence on the impact of ALMPs on employment and unemployment rates. This is followed by a review of the key lessons from recent OECD country reviews of activation policies. It concludes with a discussion of crucial unanswered questions about activation.
Nynke De Groot, Bas van der Klaauw, IZA: The Effects of Reducing the Entitlement Period to Unemployment Insurance Benefits. This paper exploits a substantial reform of the Dutch UI law to study the effect of the entitlement period on job finding and subsequent labor market outcomes. Using detailed administrative data covering the full population we find that reducing the entitlement period increases the job finding rate, but decreases the job quality. Unemployed workers accept more often temporary jobs with lower wages and fewer working hours. Therefore, they also change jobs more frequently. The reform did not affect total post-unemployment earnings indicating that the positive effects on job finding and job turnover cancel out the negative effects on job quality. We also observe a spike in job finding around benefits exhaustion even, although more modest, for individuals who do not experience a drop in benefits level when moving to welfare.

2014-08-29
Bart H.H. Golsteyn, Trudie Schils, IZA: Gender Gaps in Primary School Achievement: A Decomposition into Endowments and Returns to IQ and Non-cognitive Factors. In elementary school, girls typically outperform boys in languages and boys typically outperform girls in math. The determinants of these differences have remained largely unexplored. Using rich data from Dutch elementary schools, we decompose the differences in achievement into gender differences in endowments and returns to IQ and non-cognitive factors. This descriptive analysis is a thought experiment in which we show the consequences for school performance if girls and boys would have similar resources and take similar advantage of these resources. Our findings indicate that gender differences in resources with respect to social and instrumental skills and need for achievement can explain part of the differences in performance. Boys seem to be better equipped with these resources. Additionally, boys and girls employ their skills differently. Girls take more advantage of their IQ than boys. Yet, the largest part of this parameter effect is left unexplained by IQ and non-cognitive factors.
Daniel Hallberg, Per Johansson, Malin Josephson, IFAU: Hälsoeffekter av tidigarelagd pensionering. Vi beräknar effekten av tidig pensionering på individens hälsa. Den empiriska analysen har som utgångspunkt ett erbjudande om tidig pensionering för militärer födda 1934–1939. Erbjudandet gällde pension från 55 års ålder jämfört mot normal pensionsålder som var 60 år. Vi finner positiva effekter på hälsan genom pensionserbjudandet: de som fick erbjudandet att gå i tidig pension hade både en lägre dödlighet och färre dagar i slutenvård fram till 70 års ålder. Under antagandet att resultaten för officerare kan generaliseras till befolkningen i stort, behöver alltså en höjd pensionsålder inte bara ha en positiv effekt på samhällsekonomin i form av högre arbetsutbud och högre skatteinkomster utan kan även ha en negativ sidoeffekt genom ökade kostnader för hälso- och sjukvård.
2014-08-22
Peder J. Pedersen, Torben Dall Schmidt, IZA: Life Events and Subjective Well-being: The Case of Having Children. In the present paper we focus on the eventual impact on SWB from having children. The dominant result in the rather few studies until now is the finding of no – or even a negative – impact on subjective well being following birth of a child. We focus on the impact from having children using two very big panel data sets. In descriptive analyses using the ECHP data we find convincing evidence that there is on average in Europe a positive impact on satisfaction for married and cohabitating women from having especially the first child and to a lesser extent from having the second child. The impact is however small in absolute magnitude. In subsequent multivariate analyses using ECHP data we find significant positive effects both from having children in the family, defined here to include only married or cohabitating women, and from giving birth to a first and a second child. This is not the case for all countries in the ECHP but most systematically so for the Southern European countries and for UK and Ireland representing the liberal type of welfare state. For the Continental and the Social democratic welfare state, we find no impact on satisfaction from having children or from birth of a child. It is well known that the eventual relationship between family policy and fertility is complex.
Katharine Bradbury, Boston FED: Labor Market Transitions and the Availability of Unemployment Insurance. Economists often expect unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to elevate unemployment rates because recipients may choose to remain unemployed in order to continue receiving benefits, instead of accepting a job or dropping out of the labor force. This paper uses individual data from the Current Population Survey for the period between 2005 and 2013—a period during which the federal government extended and then reduced the length of benefit availability to varying degrees in different states—to investigate the influence of program parameters in the UI system on monthly transition rates of unemployed individuals. The main finding is that unemployed job losers tend to remain unemployed until they exhaust UI benefits, at which point they become more likely to drop out of the labor force; transitions to a job appear to be unaffected by UI benefit extensions. These findings imply that the longer periods of benefit eligibility under the federal programs contributed to the elevated jobless rates observed during that period, but not via lower employment. By the same token, the sharp contraction of benefit weeks that occurred in 2012 and continued more gradually in 2013 likely contributed to declines in unemployment and participation rates beyond what one would expect based on the improving economy alone. Similarly the 2013 sudden cutoff of federal UI payments to an estimated 1.3 million jobless Americans who had been looking for work for more than six months is adding to the pace of transitions from unemployment to dropping out of the labor force, thus reducing the unemployment rate and the labor force participation rate further in the first half of 2014, although very modestly.
2014-06-18
Daniele Checchi, Herman G. van de Werfhorst, IZA: Educational Policies and Income Inequality. In this paper we study the associations between educational policies, distributions of educational attainments and income distributions. By matching inequality measures on test scores, years of education and labour earnings by country, birth cohorts and gender, we show that inequality in education (measured both at quality and quantity levels) affect earnings inequality. We then consider potential endogeneity of educational distributions and we resort to instrumental estimation using information on government reforming activity in the field of education. By controlling for country-specific and time fixed effects, and by separating age and cohorts effects, we prove that educational inequality respond to educational reforms, identifying educational policies (like later entry into compulsory education or introduction of standardised tests) capable to reduce income inequalities thirty years later.
Petri Böckerman, Ohto Kanninen, Ilpo Suoniemi, IZA: A Kink that Makes You Sick: The Incentive Effect of Sick Pay on Absence. This paper examines the effect of the replacement rule of the Finnish sickness insurance system on the duration of sickness absence. A pre-determined, piecewise linear policy rule in which the replacement rate is determined by past earnings allows identification of the effect using a regression kink design. We find a substantial and robust behavioral response. The statistically significant point estimate of the elasticity of the duration of sickness absence with respect to the replacement rate is on the order of 1.4.
2014-06-11
Alan B. Krueger, Andreas I. Mueller, NBER: A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages. This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using highfrequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that selfreported reservation wages decline at a modest rate over the spell of unemployment, with point estimates ranging from 0.05 to 0.14 percent per week of unemployment. The decline in reservation wages is driven primarily by older individuals and those with personal savings at the start of the survey. The longitudinal nature of the data also allows us to test the relationship between job acceptance and the reservation wage and offered wage, where the reservation wage is measured from a previous interview to avoid bias due to cognitive dissonance. Job offers are more likely to be accepted if the offered wage exceeds the reservation wage, and the reservation wage has more predictive power in this regard than the pre-displacement wage, suggesting the reservation wage contains useful information about workers’ future decisions. In addition, there is a discrete rise in job acceptance when the offered wage exceeds the reservation wage. In comparison to a calibrated job search model, the reservation wage starts out too high and declines too slowly, on average, suggesting that many workers persistently misjudge their prospects or anchor their reservation wage on their previous wage.
Per Johansson, Lisa Laun, Marten Palme, NBER:  Pathways to Retirement and the Role of Financial Incentives in Sweden. We study how economic incentives affect labor force exit through different income security programs, old-age pensions as well as income taxes in Sweden.  We use the option value for staying in the labor force as a measure of economic incentives and estimate an econometric model for the choice of leaving the labor market. Besides old-age pension, we focus on the Disability Insurance (DI), which is the most important exit path before age 65.  By simulating the effect of different probabilities to be admitted DI we show how changes in the stringency of DI admittance affects labor supply among older workers through economic incentives.
2014-05-04
Werner Eichhorst, Verena Tobsch, IZA: Not So Standard Anymore? Employment Duality in Germany. This paper gives an overview of the transformation of the German labour market since the mid-1990s with a special focus on the changing patterns of labour market segmentation or 'dualization' of employment in Germany. While labour market duality in Germany can partially be attributed to labour market reforms promoting, in particular, non-standard forms of employment and allowing for an expansion of low pay, structural changes in the economy as well as strategic choices by employers and social partners also play a prominent role. Our main argument is that the liberalization of non-standard contracts has contributed to the expansion of overall labour market inclusion and job growth in Germany and that at least some forms of non-standard work provide stepping stones into permanent regular jobs. Atypical contracts do not necessarily undermine the dominance of standard employment relationships and job quality in this primary segment but rather form a supplementary part of employment in sectors that depend on more flexible and maybe cheaper forms of labour.
Jesper Roine, Daniel Waldenström, IZA: Long-Run Trends in the Distribution of Income and Wealth. We present the main inequality trends, in some cases starting as early as in the late eighteenth century, combining previous research with recent findings in the so-called top income literature and new evidence on wealth concentration. The picture that emerges shows that inequality was historically high almost everywhere at the beginning of the twentieth century. In some countries this situation was preceded by increasing concentration, but in most cases inequality seems to have been relatively constant at a high level in the nineteenth century. Over the twentieth century inequality decreased almost everywhere for the first 80 years, largely due to decreasing wealth concentration and decreasing capital incomes in the top of the distribution. Thereafter trends are more divergent across countries and also different across income and wealth distributions. Econometric evidence over the long run suggests that top shares increase in periods of above average growth while democracy and high marginal tax rates are associated with lower top shares.
2014-05-28
Per Johansson, Arizo Karimi, J. Peter Nilsson, IFAU: Könsskillnader i hur sjukfrånvaro påverkas av omgivningen. Vi studerar om det finns skillnader mellan hur män och kvinnor i genomsnitt tar hänsyn till kollegorna på arbetsplatsen och om kvinnors beteende i genomsnitt är mer formbart. För att undersöka detta använder vi oss av ett randomiserat experiment där man minskade kravet för sjukskrivning bland 50 procent av de boende i Göteborg. Sjukfrånvaron ökade som en konsekvens av det minskade kravet. Vi studerar hur kontrollgruppen (dvs. de som skulle ha varit opåverkade av experimentet) påverkas av behandlingsgruppens förändrade sjukfrånvaro. Vi finner en signifikant ökad sjukfrånvaro bland både kvinnor och män i kontrollgruppen, vilket tyder på att båda könen påverkas av sin omgivnings sjukfrånvaro. Däremot tycks kvinnor endast påverkas av sina kvinnliga kollegor, och män endast av sina manliga kollegor.
Alexander Hijzen, Balint Menyhert, IZA: The dispersed welfare costs of unemployment: Risk, insurance and perceptions of job insecurity. Despite the plenitude of relevant research on the well-being costs of unemployment and perceived job insecurity on the individual level, the question of whether and how these are disseminated among the continuously employed received less attention. The few existing studies find that increases in the local unemployment rate have strong negative impacts on the well-being of the employed. In this paper, we address the same question but make several important departures from the existing literature in order to cover a wide range of European countries, to make more nuanced assertions as regards the relative importance of the main risk and insurance components, and to better identify the main mechanism and the role of different factors at play. In particular, using semiaggregated data compiled from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) and the European Social Survey (ESS), we find that (1) reemployment opportunities matter more from a welfare point-of-view than the risk of becoming unemployed, that (2) unemployment insurance can considerably mitigate the ill-effects of unemployment, and that (3) much of the well-being effect of higher unemployment can indeed be attributed to perceived differences in job insecurity.
2014-05-21
Olivier Baguelina, Delphine Remillon, Labour Economics: Unemployment Insurance and Management of the Older Workforce in a Dual Labor Market: Evidence from France. The analysis is conducted using data from the French employment agency over the period 2001 to 2005. It is based on a natural experiment: on January 1, 2003, the potential benefit duration of UI entrants was sharply reduced. Econometric analysis of the age patterns of UI inflow reveals that the age incentives provided by UI rules greatly influence labor market behaviors: dismissals of insiders close to retirement are often scheduled so that they can receive benefits until retirement. We estimate that the reform increased the mean age at job termination of workers dismissed close to retirement by 4 months. Our findings confirm that UI rules have an impact on inflow into unemployment and that UI is viewed by some employers and/or some workers as an early retirement scheme rather than as insurance against the risk of job loss. Thus, addressing the issue of older workers’ participation in the labor market requires consideration of the joint impact of UI and retirement system rules.
OECD: Society at a Glance 2014.  The financial upheaval of 2007-08 created not just an economic and fiscal crisis but also a social crisis. Countries that experienced the deepest and longest downturns are seeing profound knock-on effects on people’s job prospects, incomes and living arrangements. Some 48 million people in OECD countries are looking for a job – 15 million more than in September 2007 – and millions more are in financial distress. The numbers living in households without any income from work have doubled in Greece, Ireland and Spain. Low-income groups have been hit hardest as have young people and families with children. With households under pressure and budgets for social support under scrutiny, more and more people report dissatisfaction with their lives, and trust in governments has tumbled. There are also signs that the crisis will cast long shadows on people’s future well-being. Indeed, some of the social consequences of the crisis, in areas like family formation, fertility and health, will be felt only in the long term. Fertility rates have dropped further since the start of the crisis, deepening the demographic and fiscal challenges of ageing. Families have also cut back on essential spending, including on food, compromising their current and future well-being. It is still too early to quantify the longer-term effects on people’s health, but unemployment and economic difficulties are known to contribute to a range of health problems, including mental illness.
2014-05-14
Daniel S. Hamermesh, Daiji Kawaguchi, Jungmin Lee, IZA: Does Labor Legislation Benefit Workers? Well-Being after an Hours Reduction. Are workers in modern economies working "too hard" – would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime penalty that had become effective with fewer weekly hours per worker. Using repeated cross sections we show that life satisfaction in both countries may have increased relatively among those workers most likely to have been affected by the legislation. The same finding is produced using Korean longitudinal data. In a household model estimated over the Korean cross-section data we find some weak evidence that a reduction in the husband's work hours increased his wife's well-being. Overall these results are consistent with the claim that legislated reductions in work hours can increase workers' happiness.
Luc Behaghel, Didier Blanchet, Muriel Roger, NBER:  Retirement, Early Retirement and Disability: Explaining Labor Force Participation after 55 in France. We analyze the influence of health and financial incentives on the retirement behavior of older workers in France, building upon Stock and Wise (1990) option value approach. The model accounts for three main retirement routes:  the normal retirement, disability insurance (DI) and unemployment/preretirement pathways, and is estimated with a combination of microeconomic datasets that include the French data of the European SHARE survey. The estimates confirm that a decrease in the generosity of the pension and DI schemes induces people to stay longer in the labor market, and that people with better health tend to retire later. We present extreme situations simulating what individual's retirement behavior would have been if only one retirement route had existed and in the absence of constraints on work capabilities.  We show that average years of work between 55 and 64 are nearly 14% greater when regular retirement incentives are applied to the whole population than when it is DI rules that are systematically applied.
2014-05-07
Maurice Schiff, IZA: Can US Coordination Failure Explain Why Americans Work So Much More than Europeans? Prescott (2004) argues that Europeans work much less than Americans because of higher taxes and that they would gain significantly by charging US taxes and working as much as Americans. I argue that the opposite may be true and that Americans work more than Europeans due to a coordination failure. Studies show that utility falls with other people's income, a negative externality that is internalized in Europe through laws on the minimum amount of vacation time (and maximum hours of work), something unthinkable in the US. Thus, Americans may be stuck in an "overworking trap" and would gain by working less. A simple model and data on work time are used to obtain an estimate of the US welfare gain from reducing its work time to Europe's level. On the other hand, if neither EU nor US work time is optimal, then the sign of the EU-to-US welfare difference is positive (ambiguous) if EU work time is greater (smaller) than the optimum, while simulations show that even in the latter case, EU welfare is greater than US welfare if, relative to the optimum, the EU work 'shortage' is smaller than the US work 'surplus'.

H. Xavier Jara, Holly Sutherland, EUROMOD: The implications of an EMU unemployment insurance scheme for supporting incomes. In this paper we explore the potential of a new unemployment insurance benefit at EMU level to improve the income protection available to the unemployed and their families. The benefit is designed to be additional to existing national provision where this falls short in terms of eligibility (coverage) and the amount payable. The “EMU-UI” has a common design across countries, which is intended to reduce the extent of current gaps in coverage where these are sizeable due to stringent eligibility conditions, to increase generosity where current unemployment benefits are low relative to earnings and to extend duration where this is shorter than 12 months. We find that the EMU-UI reduces the risk of poverty for the new unemployed and has a positive effect on income stabilisation. The extent of these effects varies in size across countries for two main reasons: notable differences in design of national unemployment insurance schemes and differences in labour force characteristics across countries, mainly in the proportion of self-employed workers who are typically not covered by national schemes.
2014-04-30
Jonathan D. Ostry el al, IMF: Redistribution, Inequality, and Growth. This paper is the first to take advantage of a recently compiled cross-country dataset that distinguishes market (before taxes and transfers) inequality from net (after taxes and transfers) inequality and allows us to calculate redistributive transfers for a large number of country-year observations. Our main findings are: First, more unequal societies tend to redistribute more. It is thus important in understanding the growth-inequality relationship to distinguish between market and net inequality. Second, lower net inequality is robustly correlated with faster and more durable growth, for a given level of redistribution. These results are highly supportive of our earlier work. And third, redistribution appears generally benign in terms of its impact on growth; only in extreme cases is there some evidence that it may have direct negative effects on growth. Thus the combined direct and indirect effects of redistribution
Eva Mörk, Anna Sjögren, Helena Svaleryd: Blir barn sjuka när föräldrarna blir arbetslösa? Vi analyserar i vilken utsträckning barns hälsa påverkas av att ha arbetslösa föräldrar. Vi gör detta genom att kombinera information om barns sjukhusinskrivningar för åren 1992–2007 med registerdata över föräldrarnas arbetslöshet. Vi finner att barn med arbetslösa föräldrar i genomsnitt löper 17 procents större risk att skrivas in på sjukhus än andra barn. Det beror sannolikt i hög grad på att barn i familjer i vilka föräldrarna blir arbetslösa har sämre hälsa av flera skäl. Det är alltså svårt att veta om föräldrarnas arbetslöshet i sig påverkar sannolikheten att barn skrivs in på sjukhus. För barn till föräldrar som under perioder är arbetslösa finner vi dock att sannolikheten att hamna på sjukhus ökar med 1 procent när någon förälder är arbetslös jämfört med när föräldrarna har jobb. Vår slutsats är att arbetslöshet försämrar barns hälsa, mätt som sjukhusinskrivningar, men att effekten är liten.
2014-04-23
Försäkringskassan: Sjukfrånvaro i psykiska diagnoser. En studie av Sveriges befolkning 16–64 år. Socialförsäkringsrapport 2014:4. Analyserna bygger på modeller där risken att påbörja sjukfall längre än 14 dagar med psykisk diagnos och risken att påbörja sjukfall oavsett diagnos skattats för hela befolkningen 16–64 år bosatt i Sverige. Resultaten visar att risken att påbörja sjukfall med psykisk diagnos är avsevärt högre för kvinnor än för män. För både kvinnor och män är risken att påbörja sjukfall med psykisk diagnos högst i åldern 30–39 år och även något förhöjd för de med barn i åldern 3–12 år i familjen. Det finns också ett tydligt regionalt mönster med högre risk för sjukfall med psykisk diagnos i de tätbefolkade storstadsområdena Stockholm, Göteborg och Malmö, med omnejder. Utifrån de risker som beräknats har även samvariationen mellan upplevd arbetsmiljö i en rad olika yrken enligt Arbetsmiljöundersökningarna och risken att påbörja sjukfall studerats, och kopplingen mellan svag psykosocial arbetsmiljö och sjukfall med psykisk diagnos framträder tydligt. Både kvinnor och män verksamma inom yrken med nära kontakt med brukare av olika typer av välfärdstjänster eller andra personliga tjänster (kontaktyrken) har en tydligt högre risk att påbörja sjukfall med psykisk diagnos.
Ronald Bachmann, Daniel Baumgarten, IZA Journal: How do the unemployed search for a job? – Evidence from the EU Labour Force Survey. Using harmonised micro data, this paper investigates the job search behaviour of the unemployed in Europe. The analysis focuses on the importance of individual and household characteristics in this context, as well as on cross-country differences in Europe. Our findings suggest that both individual and household characteristics play an important role, with the latter being more decisive for women. However, even when controlling for these factors, remarkable differences remain between countries, which are associated with institutional characteristics at the country level.
Tommy Ferrarini, Kenneth Nelson, Ola Sjöberg, SOFI: Unemployment insurance and deteriorating self-rated health in 23 European countries. The purpose of this study is to analyse the role of unemployment insurance for deteriorating self-rated health in the working age population at the onset of the fiscal crisis in Europe. Method used are multilevel logistic conditional change models linking institutional-level data on coverage and income replacement in unemployment insurance to individual-level panel data on self-rated health in 23 European countries at two repeated occasions, 2006 and 2009. Unemployment insurance significantly reduces transitions into self-rated ill-health and, particularly, programme coverage is important in this respect. Unemployment insurance is also of relevance for the socioeconomic gradients of health at individual level, where programme coverage significantly reduces health risks attached to educational attainment. Unemployment insurance mitigated adverse health effects both at individual and country-level during the financial crisis. Due to the centrality of programme coverage, reforms to unemployment insurance should focus on extending the number of insured people in the labour force.

2014-04-16
AFA: Sjukskrivningsmönster hos kvinnor och män. Kvinnor har i genomsnitt fler och längre sjukperioder än män. Kvinnor som har barn under 12 år har en högre risk att bli sjukskrivna jämfört med män i samma situation. Kvinnor har en högre risk att drabbas av sjukfrånvaro som leder till månadsersättning med en muskuloskeletal diagnos jämfört med män i de mansdominerade yrkesgrupperna metallarbete och övrigt industriellt arbete. Bland privatanställda arbetare är det psykiska diagnoser som har lett till flest sjukdagar i genomsnitt. Det gäller både kvinnor och män.
Ive Marx, Lina Salanauskaite, Gerlinde Verbist, IZA: The Paradox of Redistribution Revisited: And That It May Rest in Peace? There is a long-standing controversy over the question of whether targeting social transfers towards the bottom part of the income distribution actually enhances or weakens their redistributive impact. Korpi and Palme have influentially claimed that “the more we target benefits at the poor, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality”. The basic empirical underpinning of this claim is a strong inverse relationship at the country level between social transfer targeting and redistributive impact. We show that this no longer holds as a robust empirical generalisation. The relationship between the extent of targeting and redistributive impact over a broad set of empirical specifications, country selections and data sources has in fact become a very weak one. For what it matters, targeting tends to be associated with higher levels of redistribution, especially when overall effort in terms of spending is high. We try to make substantive sense of this breakdown of the originally established relationship by focusing on two questions: first, what has changed in the countries originally included in the study and, second, what is different about the countries now additionally included in the analysis?
2014-04-09
Matthew S. Rutledge, CRR: How Long Do Unemployed Older Workers Search for a Job? The Great Recession threw many older individuals out of work. The results show little tolerance for a lengthy search; the vast majority either find a job or exit the labor force within a year. Those with financial resources, such as Social Security, leave even sooner. Interestingly, the strength of the local labor market does not seem to have much impact on the duration of job search.
G. Hensing, K. Holmgren, H. Rohdén, Department of Social Medicine, University of Gothenburg: Strong support for relocation to other work tasks: A cross-sectional study of attitudes to sickness insurance regulations in Sweden.  Profound changes are taking place in the Swedish welfare state. The general population's attitudes are important insofar changes will be perceived as fair and effective to become implemented. The aim was to study attitudes to the strictness of the sick-leave rules, relocation to other work tasks after 3 months of sick leave and applications for new jobs after 6 months of sick leave. Eligible for this questionnaire study were 1,140 individuals aged 19 to 64 years. Their attitudes were analyzed in relation to age, gender, political ideology and health status. Health status was measured as sick-leave experiences, self-reported health and level of symptoms. The study showed that 42% considered the sick-leave rules to be too strict, 60% found relocation to other work tasks to be good while 35% found that applications for new work were good. In logistic regression analyses, high sick-leave experience was associated with increased odds of finding the sick-leave rules too strict and disagreement with relocation to other work tasks or application for new jobs. In conclusion, strong support was found for relocation to other work tasks with the present employer. Earlier research on returning to work has found workplace interventions to be efficient. From a policy perspective it seems relevant to promote such interventions given the strong public opinion in their favor.
2014-04-02
Anna Godøy, Knut Røed, IZA: Unemployment Insurance and Underemployment.  Should unemployment insurance (UI) systems provide coverage for underemployed job seekers? Based on a statistical analysis of Norwegian unemployment spells, we conclude that the answer to this question is yes. Allowing insured job seekers to retain partial UI benefits during periods of insufficient part-time work not only reduces UI expenditures during the part-time work period; it also unambiguously reduces the time until a regular self-supporting job is found. Probable explanations are that even small temporary part-time jobs provide access to useful vacancy-information and that such jobs are used by employers as a screening device when hiring from the unemployment pool.
Verena Wondratschek, Karin Edmark, Markus Frölich IZA: The Short- and Long-Term Effects of School Choice on Student Outcomes: Evidence from a School Choice Reform in Sweden. This paper evaluates the effects of a major Swedish school choice reform. The reform in 1992 increased school choice and competition among public schools as well as through a large-scale introduction of private schools. We estimate the effects of school choice and competition, using precise geographical information on the locations of school buildings and children's homes for the entire Swedish population for several cohorts affected at different stages in their educational career. We can measure the long-term effects up to age 25. We find that increased school choice had very small, but positive, effects on marks at the end of compulsory schooling, but virtually zero effects on longer term outcomes such as university education, employment, criminal activity and health.
2014-03-24
Jessamyn Schaller, Ann Huff Stevens, NBER: Short-run Effects of Job Loss on Health Conditions, Health Insurance, and Health Care. Job loss in the United States is associated with long-term reductions in income and long-term increases in mortality rates.  This paper examines the short- to medium-term changes in health, health care access, and health care utilization after job loss that lead to these long-term effects.  Using a sample with more than 9800 individual job losses and longitudinal data on a wide variety of health-related measures and outcomes, we show that job loss results in worse self-reported health, including mental health, but is not associated with statistically significant increases in a variety of specific chronic conditions.  Among the full sample of workers, we see reductions in insurance coverage, but little evidence of reductions in health care utilization after job loss.  Among the subset of displaced workers for whom the lost job was their primary source of insurance we do see reductions in doctor's visits and prescription drug usage.  These results suggest that access to health insurance and care may be an important part of the health effects of job loss for some workers.  The pattern of results is also consistent with a significant role for stress in generating long-term health consequences after job loss.
Jonas Maibom Pedersen, Michael Rosholm, Michael Svarer, IZA: Can Active Labour Market Policies Combat Youth Unemployment?  Active labour market policies (ALMPs) may play an important role in preventing an increase in long-term unemployment following the Great Recession. We consider this issue for Denmark, a country relying extensively on this instrument. We present evidence on the effectiveness of ALMPs as a way of fighting youth unemployment using results from a randomised controlled trial (RCT) that intensified the use of ALMPs. The intervention was conducted after the onset of the financial crisis, and the findings are relatively unfavourable in the sense that further intensification of an already quite intensive effort for youth did not increase employment. In addition, the intensification of ALMPs seems to have in-creased transitions into sickness benefits.
2014-03-17
Iida Häkkinen Skans, ISF: Utvecklingen av socialförsäkringsförmåner sedan 1990-talet. Rapporten visar att flera av socialförsäkringsförmånerna inte har följt pris- eller löneförändringar efter den ekonomiska krisen på 1990-talet då förmånsnivåer frystes eller sänktes för att åstadkomma besparingar och öka incitament till arbete. De maximala ersättningarna i dessa försäkringar har inte hängt med löneutvecklingen, och en växande andel av den arbetande befolkningen har inkomster som överstiger takbeloppen. År 2010 hade nästan hälften av männen och en fjärdedel av kvinnorna i åldersgruppen 20–64 år en inkomst som översteg taket på 7,5 prisbasbelopp i sjukförsäkringen. År 1992 hade endast 14 procent av männen och 2 procent av kvinnorna i den åldersgruppen en inkomst som översteg taket. I arbetslöshetsförsäkringen är taket numera lägre än den lägsta tiondelens heltidslön. År 1992 var ersättningstaket i arbetslöshetsförsäkringen högre än medianlönen.
Michael Lechner, Nazmi Sari, IZA: Labor Market Effects of Sports and Exercise: Evidence from Canadian Panel Data. Based on the Canadian National Population Health Survey we estimate the effects of individual sports and exercise on individual labor market outcomes. The data covers the period from 1994 to 2008. It is longitudinal and rich in life-style, health, and physical activity information. Exploiting these features of the data allows for a credible identification of the effects as well as for estimating dose-response relationships. Generally, we confirm previous findings of positive long-run income effects. However, an activity level above the current recommendation of the WHO for minimum physical activity is required to reap in the long-run benefits.
2014-03-12
James J. Heckman, Tim Kautz (NBER):   Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills—personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences--that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. Their predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills. Character is a skill, not a trait. At any age, character skills are stable across different tasks, but skills can change over the life cycle. Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments. High-quality early childhood and elementary school programs improve character skills in a lasting and cost-effective way.
Ole Christian Lien, Arbeid og velferd: Få bytter jobb etter fylte 50 år. Bare 5–6 prosent av arbeidstakerne over 50 år bytter jobb i løpet av et år. Til tross for at folk over 50 jobber stadig lenger, har denne andelen vært stabil siden tidlig på 2000-tallet. Ifølge tall fra OECD er det bare islendingene i Europa som i større grad enn nordmenn velger å bli i den jobben de har etter de har fylt 50 år. Dette er sannsynligvis først og fremst uttrykk for at norske seniorer har trygge og stabile jobber som de trives i.
2014-03-03
Alan B. Krueger, Andreas I. Mueller, IZA: A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self-reported reservation wages decline at a modest rate over the spell of unemployment, with point estimates ranging from 0.05 to 0.14 percent per week of unemployment. The decline in reservation wages is driven primarily by older individuals and those with personal savings at the start of the survey. Job offers are more likely to be accepted if the offered wage exceeds the reservation wage, and the reservation wage has more predictive power in this regard than the pre-displacement wage.
SBU: Arbetsmiljöns betydelse för symtom på depression och utmattningssyndrom. SBU har gått igenom forskningsläget för samband mellan en lång rad faktorer i arbetsmiljön och depressionssymtom, respektive symtom på utmattningssyndrom. Det visar sig att forskningen främst varit inriktad på betydelsen av organisatoriska och psykosociala faktorer. Det finns vetenskapligt underlag för att bl.a. följande gäller på gruppnivå: Personer som upplever en arbetssituation med små möjligheter att påverka, i kombination med alltför höga krav, utvecklar mer depressionssymtom. Personer som upplever bristande medmänskligt stöd i arbetsmiljön utvecklar mer symtom på depression och utmattningssyndrom än andra. De som upplever mobbning eller konflikter i sitt arbete utvecklar mer depressionssymtom än andra, men det går inte att avgöra om det finns något motsvarande samband för symtom på utmattningssyndrom. Personer som upplever att de har pressande arbete eller en arbetssituation där belöningen upplevs som liten i förhållande till ansträngningen utvecklar mer symtom på depression och utmattningssyndrom än andra.
2014-02-24

Simen Markussen, Knut Røed, IZA: The Impacts of Vocational Rehabilitation. Based on local variations in vocational rehabilitation (VR) priorities, we examine the impacts of alternative VR programs on short- and long-term labor market outcomes for temporary disability insurance (TDI) claimants in Norway. The analysis builds on rich and detailed administrative registers covering 345,000 claimants. We find that a strategy focusing on rapid placement in the regular labor market is superior to alternative strategies giving higher priority to vocational training or sheltered employment. Strategies prioritizing subsidized regular education also tend to be relatively successful in terms of final outcomes, but at the cost of protracted periods of benefit dependency first.
Mikko Myrskylä, Taina Leinonen, Pekka Martikainen, Finnish centre for pensions, working papers: Life expectancy by labor force status and social class: Recent period and cohort trends and projections for Finland. We use Finnish register data for the years 1989–2007 to analyze period and cohort trends in life, work and retirement expectancies at age 50 by social class. The period and cohort perspectives complement each other as the period perspective describes what would happen to a cohort if it were exposed to a certain year’s conditions throughout life, and the cohort perspective describes what in reality happens to a cohort as it ages over time. We use the Lee-Carter method to complete mortality and linear extrapolation to complete the labor force participation of partially observed cohorts. Over the period 1989–2007, period life expectancy at age 50 increased 3–4 years for men and women. Old-age retirement expectancy increased about as much. Work expectancy declined in the early 1990s but has since been on an upward trajectory, being in 2007, at 9 years, approximately a year higher than in 1989 for both men and women. The fraction of years that are spent working at ages above 50 declined from 33% to 31% for men and stayed at 26% for women. These trends were similar across the social classes. However, there were large level differences as the upper classes have the highest life, work and retirement expectancies. For example in 2007, the work expectancy difference between upper non-manual and manual workers was 3.8 years (men) and 3.4 years (women); for old-age retirement the differences were 4.5 years (men) and 3.5 years (women).

2014-02-17

Stina Petersson, Stockholms universitets Linnécentrum: Utrikes födda på arbetsmarknaden - En forskningsöversikt. Utrikes födda verkar gynnas mer av att ha inrikes än utrikes födda personer i sina nätverk, i synnerhet om den sociala kontakten sker på arbetsplatsen. Även diskrimineringen av utrikes födda missgynnar deras sysselsättning och löner, i synnerhet männens. Utrikes föddas sämre löneläge verkar dessutom delvis kunna förklaras av att de oftare är överkvalificerade för sina arbetsuppgifter än inrikes födda, och att de förlorar mer lönemässigt på överkvalificeringen. Detta verkar också kunna förklaras av att de har en lägre utbildningsavkastning, även om de har genomgått sin högsta utbildning i Sverige.

Marcus Eliason, IFAU: Uppsägningar och alkoholrelaterad sjuklighet och dödlighet. De som förlorade sina jobb i samband med arbetsplatsnedläggningar under 1990-talet hade en högre alkoholrelaterad sjuklighet och dödlighet. Det visar en ny rapport från IFAU. Studien följer 330 000 personer som förlorade sina jobb i samband med arbetsplatsnedläggningar under 1990-talet. Resultaten visar att dessa personer hade 10–41 procents högre risk att drabbas av alkoholrelaterade sjukdomar eller tillstånd som resulterade i sjukhusvård eller dödsfall än jämförbara personer som inte var med om dessa nedläggningar.
2014-02-10

Marika Cabral, Neale Mahoney, NBER:  Externalities and Taxation of Supplemental Insurance: A Study of Medicare and Medigap. Most health insurance policies use cost-sharing to reduce excess utilization.  The purchase of supplemental insurance can blunt the impact of this cost-sharing, potentially increasing utilization and exerting a negative externality on the primary insurance provider. This paper estimates the effect of private Medigap supplemental insurance on public Medicare spending using Medigap premium discontinuities in local medical markets that span state boundaries. Using administrative data on the universe of Medicare beneficiaries, we estimate that Medigap increases an individual's Medicare spending by 22.2%.  We find that the take-up of Medigap is price sensitive with an estimated demand elasticity of -1.8.  Using these estimates, we calculate that a 15% tax on Medigap premiums would generate combined tax revenue and cost savings of $12.9 billion annually.  A Pigouvian tax would generate combined annual savings of $31.6 billion.
Werner Eichhorst et al, IZA: How to Combine the Entry of Young People in the Labour Market with the Retention of Older Workers?  This paper provides an overview of the employment situation of young and old workers in the EU Member States, setting out the most recent development during the crisis and dealing with policies implemented to promote the employment of both groups. The evidence collected shows that there is no competition between young and older workers on the labour market. Structural or general policies to enhance the functioning of EU labour markets are crucial to improving the situation of both groups. However, the responsibility for employment policies still predominantly lies within Member States of the European Union, although initiatives taken at the EU level can provide added value, particularly through stimulating the exchange of experiences and facilitating regional and cross-border mobility throughout the EU.
2014-02-03

Ett förlängt arbetsliv - forskning om arbetstagarnas och arbetsmarknadens förutsättningar. Rapport från riksdagen 2013/14:RFR8. Slutsatserna från etablerad forskning inom området visar att förändringar bör göras på såväl individ- som arbetsplats- och samhällsnivå om man vill kunna öka de äldres deltagande på arbetsmarknaden. För individen är det bland annat viktigt att ta tillvara erbjudanden om kompetensutveckling. Ar-betstagare i åldern 55+ bör även uppmärksamma sin hälsa genom att lyssna på kroppens signaler. Arbetsgivare bör skapa en miljö där alla medarbetare kan prestera väl utifrån sina förutsättningar, oavsett ålder och kön. Ett åldersmedvetet ledarskap kan behöva utvecklas i organisationen, vilket kan innebära kunskap om åldrandets processer och om förutsättningar för ett längre arbetsliv. Ett åldersmedvetet ledarskap fokuserar på individuella förut-sättningar. På samhällsnivå är det viktigt att påverka attityderna till arbets-kraft över 55 år.
Pathric Hägglund, ISF Effekterna av handläggarnas attityder på sjukskrivningstiderna. Resultaten visar att en högre regel- och resultatorientering hos handläggare, det vill säga en positivare inställning till regelverket och betydelsen av att nå uppsatta verksamhetsmål, leder till kortare sjukfall. Skillnaden mellan de 25 procent som är mest positiva till aktuella regler och de 25 procent som är minst positiva ger en effekt som motsvarar i genomsnitt 3 sjukskrivningsdagar, eller cirka 1,5 procent.
2014-01-27

Anders Stenberg, Olle Westerlund, SOFI: Education and retirement: does University education at mid-age extend working life? To our knowledge, this paper provides the first study evaluating the effects of higher education for adults on the timing of retirement. Using detailed longitudinal population register data 1982–2010, we track first-time enrollees in higher education in 1992–1993. Our sample is aged 42–55 at the time of enrollment and thus aged 60–73 in 2010. We find that higher education increases labor market survival rates when aged 61–66 by about 5 percentage points. The estimates represent relatively large effects. Tentative calculations indicate that if enrollment occurs at age 42, the retirement delay represents about one percent in yearly earnings returns per year of tertiary education.
Katarina Baatz, Socialstyrelsen: Dödsorsaker efter utbildningsnivå. Risken att dö i förtid har minskat för såväl låg- som högutbildade i Sverige under det senaste decenniet. Men dödsrisken är fortsatt betydligt högre för dem med låg utbildning än för dem med hög utbildning. Den sämsta utvecklingen har kvinnor i åldrarna 35-64 år med låg utbildning. Risken att dö i åldern 35-64 år har minskat med 6 procent för dem med grundskoleutbildning från år 1991 till 2012. För kvinnor med eftergymnasial utbildning har dödligheten minskat med 33 procent. En viktig anledning till sociala skillnader är rökning som inte minskar bland lågutbildade kvinnor.

James J. Heckman, Tim Kautz, NBER: Fostering and Measuring Skills: Interventions that Improve Character and Cognition. The literature establishes that achievement tests do not adequately capture character skills–personality traits, goals, motivations, and preferences–that are valued in the labor market, in school, and in many other domains. Their predictive power rivals that of cognitive skills. Reliable measures of character have been developed.  All measures of character and cognition are measures of performance on some task.  In order to reliably estimate skills from tasks, it is necessary to standardize for incentives, effort, and other skills when measuring any particular skill. Character is a skill, not a trait.  At any age, character skills are stable across different tasks, but skills can change over the life cycle. Character is shaped by families, schools, and social environments.  Skill development is a dynamic process, in which the early years lay the foundation for successful investment in later years. High-quality early childhood and elementary school programs improve character skills in a lasting and cost-effective way.  Many of them beneficially affect later-life outcomes without improving cognition. There are fewer long-term evaluations of adolescent interventions, but workplace-based programs that teach character skills are promising.  The common feature of successful interventions across all stages of the life cycle through adulthood is that they promote attachment and provide a secure base for exploration and learning for the child.  Successful interventions emulate the mentoring environments offered by successful families

2014-01-14

Gordon B. Dahl et al: What Is the Case for Paid Maternity Leave? We assess the case for paid maternity leave, focusing on parents' responses to a series of policy reforms in Norway which expanded paid leave from 18 to 35 weeks. Our first empirical result is that none of the reforms seem to crowd out unpaid leave. Our second set of empirical results reveals the expansions had little effect on a wide variety of outcomes, including children's school outcomes, parental earnings and participation in the labor market in the short or long run, completed fertility, marriage or divorce. Our third finding is that paid maternity leave is regressive in the sense that eligible mothers have higher family incomes compared to ineligible mothers or childless individuals. Taken together, our findings suggest the generous extensions to paid leave were costly, had no measurable effect on outcomes and regressive redistribution properties. In a time of harsh budget realities, our findings have important implications for countries that are considering future expansions or contractions in the duration of paid leave.

Casey B. Mulligan, NBER: Uncertainty, Redistribution, and the Labor Market. The recent housing crash, financial crisis, or even political events may have altered the nature of this tradeoff or altered society’s willingness to tolerate labor market inefficiency in order to have more equity. The tradeoff would be altered by a deterioration of information about labor market outcomes that would normally help distinguish luck from the consequences of worker effort. It could also be altered by an increase in non-diversifiable risk. An increase in risk aversion, or possibly a reduction in welfare stigma, induces an optimal movement along that tradeoff in the direction of more social insurance. Under any of these scenarios, it would be no surprise that the social safety net expanded and labor market activity fell as much as they did, and uncertainty in one way or another would be the ultimate cause.

2013-12-30

Johannes F. Schmiedery et al, Boston University: The Causal Effect of Unemployment Duration on Wages: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance Extension. Does the search subsidy provided by unemployment insurance (UI) help workers find better jobs by or does the resulting increased time out of work lead to skill depreciation and lower reemployment wages? This paper investigates this question by exploiting strict age thresholds in the German UI system that determine workers' maximum potential UI benefit duration. Using a regression discontinuity (RD) design we show that longer potential benefit durations lead to sharp increases in non-employment durations while lowering post-unemployment wages. The estimates imply that each month out of work reduces wage offers (and reemployment wages) by 0.8 percent, pointing to high costs of long-term unemployment.
David M. Cutler et al, NBER: Evidence for Significant Compression of Morbidity In the Elderly U.S. Population.  The question of whether morbidity is being compressed into the period just before death has been at the center of health debates in the United States for some time. Compression of morbidity would lead to longer life but less rapid medical spending increases than if life extension were accompanied by expanding morbidity. Using nearly 20 years of data from the Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey, we examine how health is changing by time period until death. We show that functional measures of health are improving, and more so the farther away from death the person is surveyed. Disease rates are relatively constant at all times until death. On net, there is strong evidence for compression of morbidity based on measured disability, but less clear evidence based on disease-free survival.
Margarida Antunes, University of Coimbra: Economic dilemmas about unemployment benefit in the context of the future European insurance system.  Since June 2012, is under discussion in the European institutions the idea of moving towards a “genuine economic and monetary union” which includes the creation of an instrument of macroeconomic stabilization in the Eurozone based on an insurance system managed at central level. This project appears when the unemployment benefit has been subject to a double conditionality resulting from the reaffirmation of need to improve labour market flexibility and from the fiscal consolidation policies. The aim of this paper is precisely to discuss the European idea of this insurance system.

2013-12-16
Iida Häkkinen Skans, Malin Olsson, Charlotta Örn, ISF: Slopat frånvarointyg. För att förhindra missbruk av tillfällig föräldrapenning för vård av barn (vab) krävdes fram till årsskiftet 2012/13 ett intyg om barnets frånvaro innan ersättningen kunde betalas ut. Intyget slopades på grund av stora administrativa kostnader och därför att regeringen ansåg att Försäkringskassan hade goda möjligheter att kontrollera föräldrarnas användande av försäkringen utan intyg. Rapporten visar att vab-användningen bland föräldrarna var högre i början av 2013 än vid samma tid året innan. Ökningen var dock liten jämfört med den normala variationen och började dessutom flera månader innan intyget togs bort. Det är därför inte troligt att borttagandet av frånvarointyget hade någon större effekt på hur föräldrarna använde försäkringen under det första halvåret 2013.
Tomas Hemmingsson, Andreas Lundin, IFAU: Prediktorer för arbetslöshet och förtidspension. Ungdomars psykiska hälsa, personlighet, förmåga att anpassa sig i skolan samt intelligensnivå påverkar hela deras arbetsliv. Forskarna har följt ungefär 50 000 män genom arbetslivet – från sena tonår till pensionsåldern. De som varit arbetslösa mer än tre månader är oftare arbetslösa som vuxna och har oftare förtidspension. Det är inte bara ungdomsarbetslösheten i sig som skapar framtida arbetslöshet eller ett tidigt utträde från arbetsmarknaden. Det är individernas egenskaper som påverkar såväl tidig som sen arbetslöshet.

Andreas I. Mueller, Jesse Rothstein, Till M. von Wachter, NBER: Unemployment Insurance and Disability Insurance in the Great Recession.  Disability insurance (DI) applications and awards are countercyclical. One potential explanation is that unemployed individuals who exhaust their Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits use DI as a form of extended benefits. We exploit the haphazard pattern of UI benefit extensions in the Great Recession to identify the effect of UI exhaustion on DI application, using both aggregate data at the state-month and state-week levels and microdata on unemployed individuals in the Current Population Survey. We find no indication that expiration of UI benefits causes DI applications. Our estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out effects of meaningful magnitude.
Rafael Lalive, Camille Landais, Josef Zweimüller, VOX :  How much unemployment insurance do we need? In response to the Great Recession, unemployment insurance has been extended in many countries, but there is controversy over whether such extensions are optimal. Unemployment insurance entails direct fiscal costs, and encourages job seekers to prolong their search. The familiar benefit of unemployment insurance is that it allows the jobless to maintain their consumption. However, by reducing the search effort of other workers, it also improves a given worker’s chance of finding a job. Unemployment insurance extensions appear less costly when these search externalities are considered.

2013-12-09
Daniel S. J. Lechmann, Claus Schnabel, IZA: Absence from Work of the Self-Employed: A Comparison with Paid Employees: We find that absence from work is clearly less prevalent among the self-employed than among paid employees. Only to a small extent, this difference can be traced back to differences in health status and job satisfaction. Furthermore, the gap in absenteeism is apparently not driven by different behaviour in case of sickness as we find no difference in the prevalence of presenteeism between the two groups. We suspect that different behaviour in case of healthiness plays a role, highlighting potential shirking and moral hazard problems in paid employment.

Natalia Danzer, Victor Lavy, NBER: Parental Leave and Children's Schooling Outcomes: Quasi-Experimental Evidence from a Large Parental Leave Reform. This paper investigates the question whether long-term human capital outcomes are affected by the duration of maternity leave, i.e. by the time mothers spend at home with their newborn before returning to work.  Employing RD and difference-in-difference approaches, this paper exploits an unanticipated reform in Austria which extended the maximum duration of paid and job protected parental leave from 12 to 24 months for children born on July 1, 1990 or later.  We use test scores from the Austrian PISA test of birth cohorts 1990 and 1987 as measure of human capital.  The evidence suggest no significant overall impact of the extended parental leave mandate on standardized test scores at age 15, but that the subgroup of boys of highly educated mothers have benefited from this reform while boys of low educated mothers were harmed by it.

Andrey Launov, Klaus Wälde, University of Mainz, IZA: Thumbscrews for Agencies or for Individuals? How to Reduce Unemployment. To which extent does an increase in operating effectiveness of public employment agencies on the one hand and a reduction of unemployment benefits on the other reduce unemployment? Using the recent labour market reform in Germany as background we find that the role of unemployment benefit reduction for the reduction of unemployment is very modest (7% of the observed decline). Enhanced effectiveness of public employment agencies, to the contrary, explains a substantial part (34%) of the observed post-reform unemployment decline. If disincentive effects of PEA reforms had been avoided, the effect could have increased to 51%.

Olivier Baguelin, Delphine Remillony, UEVE-EPEE:  Unemployment insurance and distance to retirement: a natural experiment in France. When deciding which of his older workers he should dismiss first, depending on their distance from retirement, an employer cares about the duration of their unemployment insurance (UI) entitlement. This paper identifies and quantifies this behavior for the French labour market in mid-2000s. The analysis is conducted using data from the French employment agency over the period 2001-2006 and relies on a natural experiment: on January 1, 2003, UI entrants had their maximum entitlement duration (MED) sharply reduced. Econometric analysis reveals that these MED reductions led to an increase in the mean age at the date of UI admission of +4 months for workers laid o¤ close to retirement. No significant effect is observed neither for ends of fixed-term contract close to retirement nor for older workers laid o¤ far from retirement. This conclusion reinforces the suspicion that UI is used by French employers as an early retirement scheme.