题   目：Investigation  of a Sufficient Statics for Unemployment Insurance: A General Equilibrium  Analysis

嘉   宾：Ji-Woong  Moon，助理教授，上海财经大学

主持人：喻洋，助理教授，上海交通大学

时   间：2023年5月17日（周三）12:40-14:10

地   点：上海交通大学（徐汇校区）安泰经济与管理学院B207

内容简介：

How quantitatively significant are general  equilibrium effects when characterizing optimal un employment insurance (UI)  benefits? We answer this question by building a general equilibrium model with  incomplete financial markets and labor market frictions. In our model, firms  make decisions on entry; households make efforts to search for a job and save  assets as partial insurance against unemployment and persistent labor  productivity shocks. We align the model so that the Baily-Chetty formula is  satisfied with the model-implied micro elasticity of unemployment duration but  not under general equilibrium effects. We find that the response of the  equilibrium interest rate to UI benefits is extremely small. Therefore, the  optimal UI level is close to that meeting the Baily-Chetty formula (- 7  percent), and compared to the UI induced by the Baily-Chetty formula, the  optimal UI shows minuscule improvements in welfare (0.0015 percent in  consumption). The stagnant change in the equilibrium interest rate is because  an increase in UI benefits produces two offsetting forces: a reduction in  households’ precautionary savings due to  more insurance and a decrease in firms’ capital demand due to more unemployment. These findings suggest  that the sufficient statistics approach with the Baily-Chetty formula provides  a good approximation for the optimal UI benefits.

演讲人简介：

Ji-Woong Moon has been an Assistant Professor of  Economics at SUFE since 2020 after graduating from Penn State University. He  works on macroeconomics and labor economics and has published in the Journal  of Monetary Economics.

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