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A Menu of Insurance Contracts for the Unemployed

Author

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  • Regis Barnichon
  • Yanos Zylberberg

Abstract

Unemployment insurance (UI) programs traditionally take the form of a single insurance contract offered to job seekers. In this work, we show that offering a menu of contracts can be welfare improving in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. When insurance contracts are composed of (1) a UI payment and (2) a severance payment paid at the onset of unemployment, offering contracts with different ratios of UI benefits to severance payment is optimal under the equivalent of a single-crossing condition: job seekers in higher need of unemployment insurance should be less prone to moral hazard. In that setting, a menu allows the planner to attract job seekers with a high need for insurance in a contract with generous UI benefits, and to attract job seekers most prone to moral hazard in a separate contract with a large severance payment but little unemployment insurance. We propose a simple sufficient statistics approach to test the single-crossing condition in the data.

Suggested Citation

  • Regis Barnichon & Yanos Zylberberg, 2022. "A Menu of Insurance Contracts for the Unemployed," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 89(1), pages 118-141.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:89:y:2022:i:1:p:118-141.
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    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/restud/rdab026
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    Cited by:

    1. Ferey, Antoine, 2022. "Redistribution and Unemployment Insurance," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 345, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    2. Xing, Jie & Ma, Jingtang & Yang, Wensheng, 2023. "Optimal entry decision of unemployment insurance under partial information," Insurance: Mathematics and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 110(C), pages 31-52.

    More about this item

    Keywords

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    JEL classification:

    • J65 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

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