| This dissertation offers three empirical studies of unemployment, focusing on subjective well-being, social time, and job search effort. A key interest is how Unemployment Insurance (UI) mediates the experience of job loss and search.;The first research chapter focuses on subjective well-being. Drawing on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I follow individuals' subjective well-being as they enter and exit unemployment, to differentiate between the different pathways in and out of unemployment, to test whether finding a new job makes up for the distress of losing a job, and to test the extent to which Unemployment Insurance makes joblessness easier to live with.;The second research chapter focuses on social time during unemployment. Job loss is costly in many ways, but it offers one substantive benefit: free time away from work. Nonetheless, free time is a network good: its value depends on how many others in one's network share the same free time. The unemployed are disadvantaged because their free time comes during normal work hours, when most others are busy at their jobs. Using data from the American Time Use Survey, I find that the unemployed spend a great deal of their newfound free time alone. While unemployment does offer greater free time, it is not like the weekends and holidays that working people look forward to. Despite not having jobs, the unemployed are also looking forward to the weekends. Additionally, I find that network constraints have direct bearing on labor market activity, as greater time alone leads to a more intensive job search.;Finally, in the third research chapter, I analyze job search effort among Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients with varying levels of benefits, using more than 300,000 administrative audits of job search records. The results show that (1) the great majority (95 percent) of UI recipients maintain an active work search; (2) generous benefit amounts support commitment to search effort; and (3) the effect of UI is strongest among low-earners that have little savings or credit capacity to support rigorous job search. UI appears to support/encourage search effort among people who would otherwise drop out of the labor force. |
