Gerards, Ruud, and Welters, Riccardo (2023) Unemployment benefit eligibility requirements and perceived time pressure. Social Science Quarterly. (In Press)

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Abstract

Objectives: An emerging body of literature links stressors or obstacles (e.g., compliance to an unemployment benefit eligibility requirement) to poor job search quality, questioning the effectiveness of such requirements in helping the unemployed to find employment. We investigate whether compliance to an unemployment benefit eligibility requirement affects an unemployed person’s perception of time pressure, which theory relates to job search quality and which itself is hard to gauge.

Methods: We conduct a propensity-score matching analysis, using data on the Australian “mutual obligations” program, matching otherwise similar unemployed persons with and without an unemployment benefit eligibility requirement.

Results: Controlling for a wide range of confounders, we find a statistically significant positive effect of an unemployment benefit eligibility requirement on the affected person’s perception of time pressure as theory predicts.

Conclusions: Others have hypothesized that poor labor market outcomes for those subjected to a “mutual obligations” requirement are a result of the requirement’s adverse effect on job search quality. Our finding that compliance to unemployment benefit eligibility requirements increases an unemployed person’s perceptions of time pressure aligns with that hypothesis.

Item ID:	78001
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1540-6237
Copyright Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes. © 2023 The Authors. Social Science Quarterly published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Southwestern Social Science Association.
Date Deposited:	18 Apr 2023 01:11
FoR Codes:	38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380111 Labour economics @ 80% 38 ECONOMICS > 3801 Applied economics > 380119 Welfare economics @ 20%
SEO Codes:	15 ECONOMIC FRAMEWORK > 1505 Microeconomics > 150507 Micro labour market issues @ 100%
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