TY  - JOUR
AU  - Kuhn,Peter
AU  - Riddell,Chris
TI  - The Long-Term Effects of a Generous Income Support Program: Unemployment Insurance in New Brunswick and Maine, 1940-1991
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 11932
PY  - 2006
Y2  - January 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11932
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w11932.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Peter J. Kuhn
Department of Economics
University of California, Santa Barbara
2127 North Hall
Santa Barbara, CA  93106
Tel: 805/893-3666
Fax: 805/893-8830
E-Mail: pjkuhn@econ.ucsb.edu

Chris Riddell
Queen's University
Kingston, ON, Canada
K7L 3N6
E-Mail: chris.riddell@queensu.ca
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-10-01
AB  - Using data spanning a half century for adjacent jurisdictions in the U.S. and Canada, we study the long-term effects of a very generous unemployment insurance (UI)program on weeks worked. We find large effects. For example, in 1990, about 6 percent of employed men in Maine's northernmost counties worked fewer than 26 weeks per year; just across the border in New Brunswick that figure was over 20 percent. According to our estimates, New Brunswick's much more generous UI system accounts for about two thirds of this differential. Even greater effects are found among women and less-educated men. We argue that our longer-run, crossnational perspective generates more substantial estimates of program effects because it captures workers' abilities to make a wider variety of adjustments to programs they expect to be permanent.
ER  -