An adverse selection model of optimal unemployment insurance

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.