Job Displacement Insurance and (the Lack of) Consumption-Smoothing
利用巴西数据，研究发现工人在被解雇时消费反而增加35%，尽管长期收入下降14%，表明失业保障金发放时机对消费平滑至关重要。
We study the spending profile of workers who experience both a positive transitory income shock (lump-sum severance pay) and a negative permanent income shock (layoff). Using de-identified expenditure and employment data from Brazil, we show that workers increase spending at layoff by 35 percent despite experiencing a 14 percent long-term loss. We find high sensitivity of spending to cash-on-hand across consumption categories and for several sources of variation, including predictable income drops. A model with present-biased workers can rationalize our findings, and highlights the importance of the timing of benefit disbursement for the consumption-smoothing gains of job displacement insurance policies.