Labor Market Institutions and the Cost of Recessions

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment, and...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Krebs, Tom
Other Authors: Scheffel, Martin
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Washington, D.C. International Monetary Fund 2017
Series:IMF Working Papers
Subjects:
Online Access:
Collection: International Monetary Fund - Collection details see MPG.ReNa
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245 0 0 |a Labor Market Institutions and the Cost of Recessions  |c Tom Krebs, Martin Scheffel 
260 |a Washington, D.C.  |b International Monetary Fund  |c 2017 
300 |a 85 pages 
651 4 |a Germany 
653 |a Labor market institutions 
653 |a Wealth 
653 |a Labour; income economics 
653 |a Saving 
653 |a Incomplete Markets 
653 |a Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs: General 
653 |a Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search 
653 |a Labor markets 
653 |a Aggregate Labor Productivity 
653 |a Unemployment 
653 |a Skills 
653 |a Demand and Supply of Labor: General 
653 |a Particular Labor Markets: General 
653 |a Aggregate Human Capital 
653 |a Labor 
653 |a Labor Productivity 
653 |a Labor Demand 
653 |a Labor market 
653 |a Occupational Choice 
653 |a Macroeconomics: Consumption 
653 |a Wages 
653 |a Job destruction 
653 |a Intergenerational Income Distribution 
653 |a Human Capital 
653 |a Employment 
700 1 |a Scheffel, Martin 
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520 |a This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment, and idiosyncratic as well as aggregate labor market risk. The theoretical analysis shows that an increase in JSA and a reduction in UI reduce the output cost of recessions by making the labor market more fluid along the job finding margin and thus making the economy more resilient to macroeconomic shocks. In contarst, the effect of JSA and UI on the welfare cost of recessions is in general ambiguous. The paper also provides a quantitative appliation to the German labor market reforms of 2003-2005, the so-called Hartz reforms, which improved JSA (Hartz III reform) and reduced UI (Hartz IV reform). According to the baseline calibration, the two labor market reforms led to a substantial reduction in the output cost of recessions and a moderate reduction in the welfare cost of recessions in Germany