The Social Protection & Labor Sector (HDNSP) of the Human Development Network
sponsored this presentation by

Milan Vodopivec, Senior Labor Market Economist, HDNSP

Chaired by John Giles, Senior Labor Economist, DECRG

The seminar presented the results of two companion papers examining how a change in Slovenia’s unemployment insurance law affected incentives to take a job and the quality of post-unemployment jobs. Taking advantage the “natural experiment,” difference-in-differences results show that reducing the potential duration of unemployment benefits strongly increased the exit rate from unemployment to jobs while it had no detectable effects on wages, on the probability of securing a permanent rather than a temporary job, or on the duration of the post-unemployment job. In the light of these results, the seminar also explored how to adapt the design of the UI system when applying it to developing countries.

Presentation & Papers

Presentation - Incentive Effects of Unemployment Insurance and Transferability of UI to Developing Countries (5.4mb pdf)

Paper - How Shortening the Potential Duration of Unemployment Benefits Affects the Duration of Unemployment: Evidence from a Natural Experiment (236kb pdf)

Paper - Does Reducing Unemployment Insurance Generosity Reduce Job Match Quality? (90kb pdf)

About the Speaker

Milan Vodopivec received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. At the Bank he has worked in the Research Department and in the Human Development Network; he also served as a State Undersecretary at the Ministry of Labor of Slovenia. His research interests focus on the labor market and cash benefit systems, and he has published extensively in these areas, including in Journal of Labor Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Labour Economics, and Economics of Transition. His recent book “Income Support for the Unemployed: Issues and Options” appeared in the World Bank’s Regional and Sectoral Studies series.