Labor Seminars Amsterdam

Speaker(s)
Thomas Le Barbanchon (Bocconi University, Italy)
Date
Tuesday, 30 May 2017
Location
Amsterdam

Partial unemployment insurance enables claimants to keep part of their unemployment benefits when they work in low-earnings jobs. The reduction in current benefits leads to an increase in future benefits, so that forward-looking claimants are taxed according to a lower dynamic marginal tax rate than the static benefit-reduction rate. I develop a dynamic model of working claimants and use bunching in U.S. data at kinks of the benefit-reduction schedule to estimate the earnings elasticity to the net-of-tax rate. Consistent with forward-looking behaviors, I document that claimants expecting short spells bunch more. Counterfactual simulations suggest lowering the U.S. benefit reduction rate.