摘要：This paper investigates long-term returns from unemployment compensation,
exploiting variation from the UK JSA reform of 1996, which implied a major
increase in job search requirements for eligibility and in the related
administrative hurdle. Search theory predicts that such changes should raise the
proportion of non-claimant nonemployed, with consequences on search effort and
labor market attachment, and lower the reservation wage of the unemployed, with
negative effects on post-unemployment wages. I test these ideas on longitudinal
data from Social Security records (LLMDB). Using a difference in differences
approach, I find that individuals who start an unemployment spell soon after JSA
introduction, as opposed to six months earlier, are 2.5-3% more likely to move
from unemployment into Incapacity Benefits spells, and 4% less likely to have
positive earnings in the following year. This latter employment effect only
vanishes four years after the initial unemployment shock. At the same time,
earnings for the treated individuals seem to be lower than for the non treated,
but the confidence intervals around these estimated effects are quite large to
exclude a wider variety of scenarios. These results suggest that while tighter
search requirements were successful in moving individuals off unemployment
benefits, they were not successful in moving them onto new or better jobs, with
fairly long lasting unintended consequences on a number of labor market
outcomes.
