Unemployment Insurance and Moral Hazard on the Job

Abstract

This paper studies how Unemployment Insurance (UI) affects labor market outcomes through the incentives of employed workers to exert effort on the job, in addition to the well-documented effects on unemployed workers’ search behavior. Using US data, I find that higher UI benefits significantly increase the likelihood of job separations due to discharge or layoff. I rationalize this finding and quantify its policy implications in a dynamic model that features hidden effort on the job as well as hidden job search effort. In this environment, long-term wage contracts arise endogenously to mitigate moral hazard on the job, prescribing wage cuts and separations when firms receive signals of low effort. In a naive calibration that ignores on-the-job moral hazard, doubling the replacement rate reduces aggregate output by only 0.6% and would appear close to optimal. In the benchmark calibration, disciplined by my empirical estimate of the firing elasticity and observed wage-cut patterns, the generosity of the current US system is already roughly optimal, and doubling the replacement rate would reduce aggregate output by 4.8%. These results highlight the importance of considering the optimal responses of all workers, not just the unemployed, when evaluating UI policy.

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