We compute the potential economic benefits that would accrue to a typical pre-WWII era US worker from the post-WWII macroeconomic policy regime. We assume that workers face undiversifiable income risk but can self-insure by saving in nominal assets. The worker’s average utility is computed for two eras: pre-WWII (1875-1941) and post-WWII. In the pre-WWII era, the worker endured business cycles ...

We analyzed data from 50 states and the District of Columbia from 1960 to 2005 to study how the unemployment rate and the divorce rate are related. Unemployment is positively related to divorce in a bivariate analysis, but the association is not significant when state and year fixed effects are included in the statistical model. When the sample is divided into time periods, unemployment is nega...

In this paper, we study both theoretically and empirically how optimal Unemployment Insurance (UI) bene…ts vary with local labor market conditions. Theoretically, we show in a search model that the adverse incentive e¤ect of UI varies with the current level of unemployment and we consider the policy implications using a "su¢ cient statistics" approach to welfare analysis. This analysis motivate...