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 (i) a UI payment and (ii) 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.

中文翻译：

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失业保险合同菜单

摘要

传统上，失业保险（UI）计划采用向求职者提供的一份保险合同的形式。在这项工作中，我们展示了提供菜单在存在逆向选择和道德风险的情况下，合同的签订可以改善福利。当保险合同由（i）失业保险金和（ii）在失业开始时支付的遣散费组成时，在单一交叉条件下，提供具有不同UI福利与遣散费比率的合同是最佳的：寻求更高失业保险的求职者应该减少道德风险。在这种情况下，菜单可以使计划人员在具有大量UI福利的合同中吸引对保险有高需求的求职者，并在单独的合同中以较高的遣散费支付失业保险，从而吸引最容易受到道德风险侵害的求职者。我们提出了一种简单的充分统计方法来测试数据中的单交叉条件。