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Extended Unemployment Benefits and Early Retirement: Program Complementarity and Program Substitution

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  • Inderbitzin, Lukas
  • Staubli, Stefan
  • Zweimüller, Josef

Abstract

This paper explores how extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits targeted to older workers affect early retirement and social welfare. We argue that the analysis of UI's tradeoff between consumption smoothing and moral hazard needs to consider the entire early retirement system, which often consists of extended UI and relaxed access to disability insurance (DI). We argue that extended UI generates program complementarity (higher future take-up of DI and/or regular retirement benefits) or program substitution (lower contemporaneous take-up of DI benefits). Exploiting Austria's regional extended benefit program, which extended regular UI benefits to up to 4 years, we find: (i) program complementarity is quantitatively important for workers aged 50+; and (ii) program substitution is quantitatively relevant for workers aged 55+. We derive an optimal UI formula in the spirit of Baily (1978) and Chetty (2006) that features program complementarity and program substitution. Using the sufficient statistics approach, we conclude that UI for older workers was too generous and the regional extended benefit program was a suboptimal policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Inderbitzin, Lukas & Staubli, Stefan & Zweimüller, Josef, 2013. "Extended Unemployment Benefits and Early Retirement: Program Complementarity and Program Substitution," Economics Working Paper Series 1323, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:usg:econwp:2013:23
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Early retirement; unemployment; disability; policy reform; optimal benefits;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J14 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Economics of the Elderly; Economics of the Handicapped; Non-Labor Market Discrimination
    • J26 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor - - - Retirement; Retirement Policies
    • J65 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings

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