Thomas Le Barbanchon Discusses Unemployment Insurance at the French Parliament

Thomas Le Barbanchon, of the Department of Economics, was at the Assemblée Nationale, the French Parliament, last week at a conference organized by a working group of French MPs, to discuss his studies on the effects of unemployment insurance on job finding.

The group is preparing a report proposing the creation of a team of economists within the French Parliament that would evaluate both ex-ante and ex-post public policies voted by Assemblée Nationale. The purpose of the conference was to showcase results of the studies on the evaluation of public policies conducted by French academics, working at French and international universities.

Le Barbanchon highlighted the results of his studies on the effects of unemployment insurance on unemployment duration and on match quality. He underlined how two key results emerged: doubling the generosity of unemployment benefits increases by around 28% the duration of unemployment duration, while it does not significantly affect the wages or the employment duration of new jobs. "While these results need to be confirmed with larger samples, they are obtained with a credible identification strategy, leveraging discontinuities in the eligibility rule to unemployment insurance," says Le Barbanchon.