جستجوی کار و بیمه بیکاری: شواهد جدید از زمان استفاده از داده

This paper provides new evidence on job search intensity of the unemployed in the U.S., modeling job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities. The major findings are: 1) the average U.S. unemployed worker devotes about 41 min to job search on weekdays, which is substantially more than their European counterparts; 2) workers who expect to be recalled by their previous employer search substantially less than the average unemployed worker; 3) across the 50 states and D.C., job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits, with an elasticity between −1.6 and −2.2; 4) job search intensity for those eligible for Unemployment Insurance (UI) increases prior to benefit exhaustion; and 5) time devoted to job search is fairly constant regardless of unemployment duration for those who are ineligible for UI.

It is well known that since the early 1980s the unemployment rate has been lower in the U.S. than in Europe. Our tabulations of international time use data (circa 1998–2007) also indicate that unemployed Americans tend to devote much more time to searching for a new job than their European counterparts (see Fig. 1). On weekdays, for example, the average unemployed worker spent 41 min a day searching for a job in the U.S., compared with just 12 min in the average European country with available data. One explanation for the comparatively low unemployment rate and high search time in the U.S. is the relatively modest level and short duration of Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits in most states in the U.S. In this paper we examine the effects of UI on the amount of time devoted to job search by unemployed workers in the U.S., using features of state UI laws for identification.A large and related literature examines the effects of UI on the duration of unemployment spells. For example, more generous UI benefits have been found to be associated with longer spells of unemployment, with an elasticity of about 1.0 (see Krueger and Meyer (2002) for a survey). In addition, the job finding rate jumps up around the time benefits are exhausted (Moffitt, 1985 and Katz & Meyer, 1990a; see Card et al., 2007 for a critical review). UI is expected to affect the duration of unemployment through its effect on the amount of effort devoted to searching for a job and the reservation wage of the unemployed, yet these variables have rarely been studied directly.1 We attempt to fill this void by modeling the amount of time that unemployed individuals devote to searching for a new job over the course of unemployment spells using data from the American Time Use Surveys (ATUS) from 2003 to 2007. Section 2 describes the ATUS data and presents summary statistics. In Section 3, we evaluate the predictions of Mortensen's (1977) canonical model of UI and job search.2 The Mortensen model predicts that for a newly laid-off worker, search effort is decreasing in the level of UI benefits, whereas for those unemployed who are not eligible for UI or who have exhausted their UI benefits, search effort is increasing in the benefit level. This latter implication is called the entitlement effect, as higher benefits raise the value of being unemployed in the future and thus raise the value of obtaining a job.3 Furthermore, the model predicts that search effort is increasing in the mean wage offer and the dispersion of potential wage offers. The intuition for the latter is that, with a higher dispersion of potential wages, there is a greater benefit from searching for a high paying job.4 We also expect search effort to be lower for those unemployed who expect to be recalled to their previous job (see Katz, 1986).5 We empirically test these predictions and estimate the effect on job search of the generosity of UI benefits, job seekers' predicted wages, within-state residual wage dispersion, recall expectations and other variables. Most importantly, we find that job search intensity is inversely related to UI benefit generosity for those who are eligible for UI. In Section 4, we evaluate the predictions of the Mortensen model regarding job search intensity and unemployment duration. The model predicts that for an eligible unemployed, job search effort increases over the unemployment spell as benefits are exhausted. After benefits are exhausted, job search effort is predicted to remain constant. An unemployed individual who is ineligible for benefits is predicted to devote a constant amount of time to job search because of the absence of learning and the assumption of stationarity in the Mortensen model. In the ATUS data, we find a striking contrast in the profiles of job search activity across those with different durations of unemployment: search activity increases as week 26 (benefit exhaustion) approaches for the UI eligible, while the profile is fairly flat for those who are ineligible for UI. Section 5 offers some concluding thoughts as to how our results relate to search theory and how time use data can be used to further study UI and job search behavior.

This paper provides new evidence on job search intensity and Unemployment Insurance. We use data from the American Time Use Survey and model job search intensity as time allocated to job search activities, consistent with theoretical models. We find that time allocated to job search is inversely related to the maximum weekly benefit amount for UI eligible workers, with an elasticity of −1.6 to −2.2, which is large enough to account for much of the gap in job search time between the U.S. and Europe. Moreover, job seekers who likely have less access to financial resources (e.g., because they do not have a working spouse) tend to respond more to UI benefits than do those with greater financial wherewithal, consistent with a role for liquidity constraints. Furthermore, we find that job search increases sharply in the weeks prior to benefit exhaustion, in line with Mortensen's (1977) model. These findings highlight the utility of simple search models for understanding job search behavior and UI. A finding that is inconsistent with Mortensen's (1977) search model, however, is that search effort appears to decline after week 26, when benefits run out, rather than remain constant. This finding deserves further attention. One possible explanation is that the unemployed become discouraged if they fail to find a job despite substantially increasing their search effort before UI benefits run out at 26 weeks, and consequently stop searching. A related explanation is that the unemployed may feel that they have explored all of their plausible job opportunities after they sharply raised their search effort in the weeks leading up to the exhaustion of their UI benefits, and rationally feel they have little to gain from maintaining the same level of search effort over the next few months. Our findings suggest that time use data offer a fruitful approach for research on job search intensity. In particular, if future ATUS surveys collect data on unemployment duration, one could further investigate the link between unemployment duration and job search. Longitudinal time use data would help to control for length-based sampling and individual heterogeneity in job search activity. Moreover, data on severance payments and asset positions of the unemployed could allow one to determine the relative importance of moral hazard and liquidity effects of unemployment benefits.