An adverse selection model of optimal unemployment insurance

B-Tier
Journal: Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control
Year: 2010
Volume: 34
Issue: 3
Pages: 490-502

Authors (3)

Hagedorn, Marcus Kaul, Ashok (not in RePEc) Mennel, Tim (not in RePEc)

Score contribution per author:

0.670 = (α=2.01 / 3 authors) × 1.0x B-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

We ask whether offering a menu of unemployment insurance contracts is welfare-improving in a heterogeneous population. We adopt a repeated moral hazard framework as in Shavell and Weiss (1979), supplemented by unobserved heterogeneity about agents' job opportunities. Our main theoretical contribution is a quasi-recursive formulation of our adverse selection problem, including a geometric characterization of the state space. Our main economic result is that optimal contracts for "bad" searchers tend to be upward-sloping due to an adverse selection effect. This is in contrast to the well-known optimal decreasing time profile of benefits in pure moral hazard environments that continue to be optimal for "good" searchers in our model.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:eee:dyncon:v:34:y:2010:i:3:p:490-502
Journal Field
Macro
Author Count
3
Added to Database
2026-01-25