IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/wly/quante/v11y2020i1p437-469.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On households and unemployment insurance

Author

Listed:
  • Sekyu Choi
  • Arnau Valladares‐Esteban

Abstract

We study unemployment insurance in a framework where the main source of heterogeneity among agents is the type of household they live in: some agents live alone while others live with their spouses as a family. Our exercise is motivated by the fact that married individuals can rely on spousal income to smooth labor market shocks, while singles cannot. We extend a version of the standard incomplete‐markets model to include two‐agent households and calibrate it to the US economy with special emphasis on matching differences in labor market transitions across gender and marital status as well as aggregate wealth moments. Our central finding is that changes to the current unemployment insurance program are valued differently by married and single households. In particular, a more generous unemployment insurance reduces the welfare of married households significantly more than that of singles and vice versa. We show that this result is driven by the amount of self‐insurance existing in married households, and thus, we highlight the interplay between self‐ and government‐provided insurance and its implication for policy.

Suggested Citation

  • Sekyu Choi & Arnau Valladares‐Esteban, 2020. "On households and unemployment insurance," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 11(1), pages 437-469, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:wly:quante:v:11:y:2020:i:1:p:437-469
    DOI: 10.3982/QE865
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.3982/QE865
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.3982/QE865?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bram De Rock & Mariia Kovaleva & Tom Potoms, 2023. "A Spouse and a House are all we need? Housing Demand, Labor Supply and Divorce over the Lifecycle," Working Papers ECARES 2023-18, ULB -- Universite Libre de Bruxelles.
    2. Fernández-Blanco, Javier, 2022. "Unemployment risks and intra-household insurance," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 203(C).
    3. Bredemeier, Christian & Ndlovu, Patrick & Vujic, Suncica & Winkler, Roland, 2024. "Household Decisions and the Gender Gap in Job Satisfaction," IZA Discussion Papers 16760, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    4. Per Krusell & Toshihiko Mukoyama & Richard Rogerson & Ayşegül Şahin, 2017. "Gross Worker Flows over the Business Cycle," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(11), pages 3447-3476, November.
    5. Nezih Guner & Yuliya Kulikova & Arnau Valladares-Esteban, 2020. "Does the Added Worker Effect Matter?," Working Papers wp2020_2001, CEMFI.
    6. repec:acb:cbeeco:2023-695 is not listed on IDEAS
    7. Tom Potoms & Sarah Rosenberg, 2024. "Public insurance and marital outcomes: Evidence from the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansions," IFS Working Papers W24/53, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    8. Kathrin Ellieroth, 2019. "Spousal Insurance, Precautionary Labor Supply, and the Business Cycle - A Quantitative Analysis," 2019 Meeting Papers 1134, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    9. Serdar Birinci, 2019. "Spousal Labor Supply Response to Job Displacement and Implications for Optimal Transfers," Working Papers 2019-020, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised Jan 2024.
    10. Elena Capatina & Hyunjae Kang, 2024. "Demand for Spousal Health," ANU Working Papers in Economics and Econometrics 2024-695, Australian National University, College of Business and Economics, School of Economics.
    11. Javier López Segovia, 2023. "Consumption Commitments and Unemployment Insurance," CRC TR 224 Discussion Paper Series crctr224_2023_458, University of Bonn and University of Mannheim, Germany.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wly:quante:v:11:y:2020:i:1:p:437-469. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/essssea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.