Identifying and addressing employment barriers in Belgium, Korea and Norway

Abstract

This document, as well as any data and map included herein, are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area. 2  DELSA/ELSA/WD/SEM(2020)14 IDENTIFYING AND ADDRESSING EMPLOYMENT BARRIERS IN BELGIUM, KOREA AND NORWAY Unclassified OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers www.oecd.org/els/workingpapers OECD Working Papers should not be reported as representing the official views of the OECD or of its member countries. The opinions expressed and arguments employed are those of the author(s). Working Papers describe preliminary results or research in progress by the author(s) and are published to stimulate discussion on a broad range of issues on which the OECD works. Comments on Working Papers are welcomed, and may be sent to els.contact@oecd.org. This series is designed to make available to a wider readership selected labour market, social policy and migration studies prepared for use within the OECD. Authorship is usually collective, but principal writers are named. The papers are generally available only in their original language-English or French-with a summary in the other. This document and any map included herein are without prejudice to the status of or sovereignty over any territory, to the delimitation of international frontiers and boundaries and to the name of any territory, city or area.

Faces of joblessness in Switzerland

“…Indeed, in Swiss EU-SILC data, non-respondents are on average less educated and have lower wages than respondents (Table 1). This problem is addressed by using the appropriate weighting variable provided in the data: respondents who share similar characteristics (including age, education, employment, income and family characteristics) to non-respondents are given a higher weight in all calculations (Federal Statistical Office FSO, 2021 [6]).…”

The effect of declining unemployment benefits on transitions to employment

“…2 Optimality in the academic literature is based exclusively on risk-aversion (consumption smoothing) and does not take account of inequality aversion even though this does tend to be an important consideration for policy-makers. 3 The optimal degree of unemployment insurance is likely to depend on several factors, including the duration of unemployment, the state of the business cycle and the broader institutional context. For comprehensive reviews on the design of unemployment insurance, see Krueger and Meyer (2002[17]), Tatsimiros and Van Ours (2014[18]), Schmieder and Von Wachter (2016 [19]) and OECD (2018 [20]).…”

“…Under a new and simpler set of rules, the overall time profile of UB could remain unchanged or be adjusted to ensure fewer but larger steps even while maintaining the initial and long-term benefit at their current levels. Indeed, the Belgian UB system features one of the largest number of steps of smallest average size in the OECD and recent evidence suggests that -in a system with declining benefits -fewer but larger steps might increase jobsearch intensity and reduce unemployment (DellaVigna et al, 2017 [3]).…”

“…2 The latter is often referred to as the moral hazard effect of unemployment benefits and refers to the reduction in job-search intensity of jobless persons and their willingness to accept suitable job offers. 3 The rationale for a declining unemployment benefit schedule has traditionally been provided by models that assume that workers are risk-adverse and forward-looking (Hopenhayn and Nicolini, 1997[7]; Cahuc, Carcillo and Zylberberg, 2014 [8]). In these models, decreasing unemployment benefits later in the spell have a large impact on flows out of unemployment because it encourages job search not only among the long-term unemployed but also among forward-looking short-term unemployed.…”

“…This is the case, for example, if workers have "reference-dependent" as opposed to timeinvariant preferences, which gradually adjust to changing circumstances (e.g. reduced income and consumption levels) (DellaVigna et al, 2017 [3]). Such preferences imply that workers who become unemployed initially search intensively in an effort to restore income and consumption to the level when working, but gradually decrease their job-search intensity as they get used to the lower level of income and consumption.…”