The Value of Unemployment Insurance

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Landais, Camille; Spinnewijn, Johannes
• 署名单位: University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMIC STUDIES
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6527
• DOI: 10.1093/restud/rdaa086
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 3041-3085
• 关键词: health-insurance; consumption response; social insurance; plan choice; benefits; liquidity

摘要

Due to the absence of unemployment insurance (UI) choices, the traditional approach to estimating the value of UI is to infer it from the observed consumption response to job loss under some assumption on risk preferences. Exploiting the rich data and unique policy context in Sweden, we propose two alternative approaches that relax this assumption and we implement all three methods on the same sample of workers. The first approach considers the difference in marginal propensity to consume (MPC) when unemployed versus employed, which allows to identify the difference in prices to smooth consumption in the respective states. The second approach exploits UI choices embedded in the Swedish UI system in a Revealed Preference approach. While the drop in consumption expenditures is relatively small (similar to 13%), we find that the MPC is around 25% higher when unemployed than employed, translating into a marginal value of transfers that is at least 60% higher when unemployed than employed. This high value of UI is confirmed by our RP estimates and indicates substantial risk aversion given the relatively small drop in consumption expenditures.