The Value of Unemployment Insurance
利用瑞典数据，通过三种方法估计失业保险的价值，发现失业时边际消费倾向比就业时高约25%，转移支付的边际价值至少高60%，表明风险厌恶程度较高。
Abstract Due to the absence of unemployment insurance (UI) choices, the traditional approach to estimating the value of UI is to infer it from the observed consumption response to job loss under some assumption on risk preferences. Exploiting the rich data and unique policy context in Sweden, we propose two alternative approaches that relax this assumption and we implement all three methods on the same sample of workers. The first approach considers the difference in marginal propensity to consume (MPC) when unemployed versus employed, which allows to identify the difference in prices to smooth consumption in the respective states. The second approach exploits UI choices embedded in the Swedish UI system in a Revealed Preference approach. While the drop in consumption expenditures is relatively small ($\sim$13%), we find that the MPC is around 25% higher when unemployed than employed, translating into a marginal value of transfers that is at least $60$% higher when unemployed than employed. This high value of UI is confirmed by our RP estimates and indicates substantial risk aversion given the relatively small drop in consumption expenditures.