TY  - JOUR
AU  - Barbanchon, Thomas Le
AU  - Rathelot, Roland
AU  - Roulet, Alexandra
TI  - Unemployment Insurance and Reservation Wages: Evidence from Administrative Data
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 23406
PY  - 2017
Y2  - May 2017
DO  - 10.3386/w23406
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23406
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w23406.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Thomas Le Barbanchon
Bocconi University
Via Roentgen 1
Milano 20136
Italy
E-Mail: lebarbanchon@unibocconi.it

Roland Rathelot
University of Warwick
Department of Economics
Coventry  CV4 7AL
UK
E-Mail: R.Rathelot@warwick.ac.uk

Alexandra Roulet
Insead
Boulevard de Constance
 77300 Fontainebleau, France
France
E-Mail: alexandra.roulet@insead.edu
M1  - published as Thomas Le Barbanchon, Roland Rathelot, Alexandra Roulet. "Unemployment Insurance and Reservation Wages: Evidence from Administrative Data," in Roger Gordon, Andreas Peichl and James Poterba, organizers, "Social Insurance Programs (Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar, TAPES)" Journal of Public Economics, Volume 171 (Elsevier) (2019)

M3  - presented at "Trans-Atlantic Public Economics Seminar", June 13-15, 2016
AB  - Although the reservation wage plays a central role in job search models, empirical evidence on the determinants of reservation wages, including key policy variables such as unemployment insurance (UI), is scarce. In France, unemployed people must declare their reservation wage to the Public Employment Service when they register to claim UI benefits. We take advantage of these rich French administrative data and of a reform of UI rules to estimate the effect of the potential benefit duration (PBD) on reservation wages and on other dimensions of job selectivity, using a difference-in-difference strategy. We cannot reject that the elasticity of the reservation wage with respect to PBD is zero. Our results are precise and we can rule out elasticities larger than 0.006. Furthermore, we do not find any significant effects of PBD on the desired number of hours, duration of labor contract and commuting time/distance. The estimated elasticity of actual benefit duration with respect to PBD of 0.3 is in line with the consensus in the literature. Exploiting a regression discontinuity design as an alternative identification strategy, we find similar results.
ER  -