مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد نتایج غیرمنتظره بیمه بیکاری (الزویر)

Unemployment insurance (UI) is a mechanism of consumption smoothing designed to cover displaced workers that has been largely adopted in both developed and developing countries. In Brazil, public expenditure with UI benefits reached over US$ 10.1 billion and covered 8.4 million workers laid-off from a formal job in 2014. Despite the program economic relevance, we do not find many studies investigating its impacts on Brazilian labor market turnover1 . Most theoretical research on UI have focused on evaluating the properties of an optimal contract in the presence of moral hazard. As for the empirical work, most studies show how changes in level and potential UI duration distort the unemployment spell of eligible displaced workers. However, little attention has been given to the behavior of the non-eligible as well as of those individuals already employed. In particular, little is known about how the probability of being laid off responds to changes in the incentives provided by the UI system (Mortensen, 1977; Chetty and Finkelstein, 2013). This paper exploits an exogenous change in the eligibility criteria for UI benefit to assess its causal effect on layoffs. Using a difference in differences approach, we find that the UI incentives accounts for 11 − 13% of total layoffs. Besides UI payments, Brazilian workers have extra incentives to induce their dismissals as they are also entitled to redundancy pay by law.2 In fact, job turnover is relatively high in Brazil despite its strict labor legislation. According to the World Bank (2002), one third of the labor force changes job every year. Some authors argue that unemployment subsidies such as UI are behind this pattern (Barros, Corseuil, and Foguel, 2000; Gonzaga, Maloney, and Mizala, 2003). Moreover, the informal sector accounts for a large share of the labor force and it is not easy to identify workers who simultaneously receive UI and are employed in the informal economy.