The Hagedorn, Manovskii, and Mitman working paper on the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on employment has been getting a lot of press lately. In brief, they find that the end of the federal unemployment insurance extension accounts for about 1.8 million new jobs in 2014.
Mike Konczal does a useful deep dive on the paper here and is very skeptical of the result. In particular, he criticizes as implausible and empirically inaccurate labor market search models that imply employer monopsony power, which are essential to the plausibility of the result. These models are also essential to the revisionist literature on the minimum wage, holding that minimum wage increases do not reduce low-productivity workers’ employment. Curiously, Mike Konczal has defended search models in this aspect. He’s a smart guy and clearly thinks that applications of search theory to macroeconomic variables have problems that the application to the minimum wage doesn’t…
View original post 361 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments