A Social Insurance Perspective on Pandemic Fiscal Policy: Implications for Unemployment Insurance and Hazard Pay
中文摘要
本文从最优社会保险的视角考察大流行期间的财政政策。我们构建了一个简单的框架，用以分析政府的税收与转移支付如何能够模拟人们原本希望拥有的、应对大流行收入损失的保险。该框架的各种变体为以下问题提供了洞见：失业保险应如何构建，危险津贴应在何时发放以及发放多少，以及大流行期间财政政策是应仅旨在再分配收入还是也应刺激总需求。当我们运用该模型的洞见来评估大流行期间采取的失业保险措施时，我们发现社会保险框架的部分推论得到了遵循，但远非全部。就危险津贴而言，我们发现一项全国性计划提案（从未实施的HEROES法案）无论覆盖范围还是慷慨程度都超出了社会保险视角所要求的水平。我们提出，随着大流行和气候相关的自然灾害成为失业与衰退越来越常见的原因，从社会保险视角审视财政政策可能会变得日益相关。
Abstract
This paper considers fiscal policy during the pandemic through the lens of optimal social insurance. We develop a simple framework to analyze how government taxes and transfers could mimic the insurance that people would like to have had against pandemic income losses. Permutations of the framework provide insight into how unemployment insurance should be structured, when and how much hazard pay is called for, and whether fiscal policy should aim just to redistribute income or also to stimulate aggregate demand during a pandemic. When we use the insights from the model to evaluate unemployment insurance measures taken during the pandemic, we find that some, but far from all, of the implications of the social insurance framework were followed. In the case of hazard pay, we find that the proposal for a national program (the never-implemented HEROES Act) was both broader and more generous than a social insurance perspective would call for. We suggest that the social insurance perspective on fiscal policy is likely to become increasingly relevant as pandemics and climate-related natural disasters become more common causes of unemployment and recessions.