Optimal unemployment policy

Abstract

AbstractThis paper shows that the optimal policy to deal with unemployment features important roles for monitoring of search and job search assistance, with the optimal combined policy also incorporating more generous unemployment insurance (UI). These results are significantly different from the previous literature, which has overwhelmingly focused on UI on its own. I incorporate two empirically relevant phenomena that have often been ignored: private consumption smoothing and fiscal externalities from income taxes. I estimate a job search model using indirect inference on data from the March Current Population Survey, and simulate the model to evaluate a variety of policy reforms.