Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2021 · Stefano DellaVigna、Jörg Heining、Johannes F. Schmieder、Simon Trenkle
中文摘要
失业保险（UI）领取者的工作找到率在失业最初几个月下降，随后在福利耗尽点出现跃升。理论上已提出多种解释，但仅凭工作找到情况的数据很难区分这些解释。为更好地理解其背后的机制，我们对德国失业工人开展了一项基于短信的大规模调查。我们在四个月内每周两次调查了6,349名失业保险领取者的求职努力程度。该调查的面板结构使我们能够观察个体的求职努力如何随失业期的推移而演变。我们给出三个关键事实：（i）在失业保险领取期初期，求职努力保持平稳；（ii）求职努力在失业保险耗尽前有所上升，耗尽后则有所下降；（iii）失业保险领取者似乎不会刻意安排就业开始日期，使其与失业保险耗尽点重合。包含未观测异质性的标准搜索模型难以解释第二个事实，而可储存工作机会模型与第三个事实不一致。参照依赖型求职搜索模型或求职成本具有持续期依赖性的模型能够很好地刻画这些模式。
Abstract
Abstract The job-finding rate of unemployment insurance (UI) recipients declines in the initial months of unemployment and then exhibits a spike at the benefit exhaustion point. A range of theoretical explanations have been proposed, but those are hard to disentangle using data on job finding alone. To better understand the underlying mechanisms, we conducted a large text-message-based survey of unemployed workers in Germany. We surveyed 6,349 UI recipients twice a week for four months about their job search effort. The panel structure allows us to observe how search effort evolves in individuals over the unemployment spell. We provide three key facts: (i) search effort is flat early on in the UI spell, (ii) search effort exhibits an increase up to UI exhaustion and a decrease thereafter, (iii) UI recipients do not appear to time job start dates to coincide with the UI exhaustion point. A standard search model with unobserved heterogeneity struggles to explain the second fact, and a model of storable offers is not consistent with the third fact. The patterns are well captured by a model of reference-dependent job search or by a model with duration dependence in search cost.