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Executive Summary
Recent unemployment insurance (UI) legislative changes that
penalise those who quit their jobs allow us to discriminate
between alternative labour market theories of worker-firm
separations. Further, the implications of behavioural responses
by workers on the cost of operating the UI system and the
substantial differences in the responses by different age and sex
groups are investigated. In response to the legislation, firms
and workers might relabel separations that would have been called
quits in terms of UI-eligible labels; alternatively, workers
might be inhibited from quitting if relabelling does not occur.
We find no evidence of relabelling, but we find that women and
young men are inhibited from quitting, whereas prime-age males
seem unaffected by the large increase in the cost of quitting
imposed by the changes. This suggests that the cost savings to
the system are actually larger than the reduction in the claim
rate of quitters, since those inhibited from quitting who would
have claimed benefits also contribute to the savings. Further, it
suggests that simple "efficient separations" models do
not adequately characterise the labour market and that labels
matter for reasons apart from pure UI eligibility. Moreover, one
simple characterisation need not comprehend the diversity of
responses to a policy change; clearly in this case different
groups' responses were not
identical.
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