Unemployment Insurance Fraud and Optimal Monitoring
American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics
vol. 7,
no. 2, April 2015
(pp. 249-90)
Abstract
An important incentive problem for the design of unemployment insurance is the fraudulent collection of unemployment benefits by workers who are gainfully employed. We show how to efficiently use a combination of tax/subsidy and monitoring to prevent such fraud. The optimal policy monitors the unemployed at fixed intervals. Employment tax is nonmonotonic: it increases between verifications but decreases after a verification. Unemployment benefits are relatively flat between verifications but decrease sharply after a verification. Our quantitative analysis suggests that the optimal monitoring cost is 60 percent of the cost in the current US system. (JEL D82, H24, J64, J65)Citation
Fuller, David L., B. Ravikumar, and Yuzhe Zhang. 2015. "Unemployment Insurance Fraud and Optimal Monitoring." American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, 7 (2): 249-90. DOI: 10.1257/mac.20130255Additional Materials
JEL Classification
- D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
- H24 Personal Income and Other Nonbusiness Taxes and Subsidies; includes inheritance and gift taxes
- J64 Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
- J65 Unemployment Insurance; Severance Pay; Plant Closings
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