This paper provides a structural model of job search and unemployment benefits claiming. Our framework is focused on three determinants of the unemployment insurance take-up: the monetary determinants, the difficulty to claim the benefits (information and transaction costs) and the non-monetary incentives such as the effectiveness of the unemployment agency as a search method. We estimate our structural model using the French Labor Force Survey. The advantage of our structural model is its ability to identify clearly, through the estimates, the economic mechanisms behind the take-up.

Joint paper with François Fontaine (Université de Strasbourg, BETA-CNRS and IZA).