NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Reservation Wages and Unemployment Insurance

Robert Shimer, Ivan Werning

NBER Working Paper No. 12618*
Issued in October 2006
NBER Program(s):   EFG    PE    LS

This paper argues that a risk-averse worker's after-tax reservation wage encodes all the relevant information about her welfare. This insight leads to a novel test for the optimality of unemployment insurance based on the responsiveness of reservation wages to unemployment benefits. Some existing estimates imply significant gains to raising the current level of unemployment benefits in the United States, but highlight the need for more research on the determinants of reservation wages. Our approach complements those based on Baily's (1978) test.

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