Research for Benefits

The government can not base the amount it pays its employees on the market value of the services it provides. Instead, it tries to set pay for each job at a level equal to pay for comparable work in private employment. Although a survey of pay for private sector workers is taken each year, there are indications that the survey is faulty and that government pay levels are too high. One indication is that quit rates are considerably lower in the government than in the private sector. Quit rates are a function of pay levels. The estimating equations in this study are derived from a simple model of labor market behavior.This model makes it clear that efficient behavior for the government does not imply either the same pay or total compensation as the private sector.

This paper focuses on some of the practical problems of unemployment compensation: who should receive it, how much should be paid, and how it should be paid.

This paper discusses three ways that unemployment insurance is believed to effect the unemployment rate through its effect on the unemployed, on employers, and through its power as a countercyclical program.

In the United States unemployment insurance benefit payments are financed predominantly by taxes on employers' payrolls. The base of this tax is not the actual but the taxable payroll. Typically the taxable payroll is much less than the actual payroll. Further, theoretical reasoning has led to the prediction that the taxable payroll should rise with (1) labor turnover, (2) wages and (3) the taxable wage base, which is the limit up to which a person's earnings are treated as taxable earnings. In this paper, the determination of the taxable payroll is examined from an empirical point of view. The results lend substantial support to the theoretical formulation.