Pricing Unemployment Insurance in Iran

Abstract Employees always concern about losing their job, or in other word, losing their income resources. For this purpose, governments require strong protection system for covering these concerns. The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program’s can be used for achieving this goal. Based on article five of Iranian unemployment Insurance law, premium is four percent of employee’s salary while employer and government’s contribution is four percent and one percent, respectively. Hence, there are great concerns about the financial pressure on the government regarding implementing this law. In this paper, we price UI based on the insurance history of employee and the duration of being unemployed. We use the Weibull distribution for finding duration of unemployment, and finally equivalence principle applied for finding the fair UI premium rate. Our findings indicate that the UI rate is less than 4% which is lower than current UI rate in Iran which has been set by law. Consequently, government’s contribution can be eliminated which reduces concerns about providing required budget by the government.