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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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