[cid:image002.png@01CEBF6B.D0B28790] VIENNA JOINT ECONOMICS SEMINAR INVITATION The University of Vienna and the Institute for Advanced Studies cordially invite you to the following Vienna Joint Economics Seminar <http://www.ihs.ac.at/vienna/resources/Economics/Papers/20130226_Paper_Zimmermann.pdf> Thursday, April 28, 2016 University of Vienna, Oskar-Morgenstern-Platz 1, 1090 Vienna, HS 15, 2nd floor 4:00 pm Andrea Weber<https://www.wu.ac.at/en/arbeitsmarkt/staff/weber-andrea/> and Margaret Meyer<http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/people/meyer.htm> WU Vienna University of Oxford Does Extending Unemployment Benefits Improve Job Quality? (Andrea Weber) Contrary to predictions of standard search models, past studies have not found a positive effect of unemployment insurance (UI) on reemployment wages. We estimate a positive UI wage effect exploiting an age-based discontinuity in Austria. Incorporating duration dependence into a job search model predicts two countervailing forces: more generous UI induces workers to seek higher-wage jobs, but reduces wages by lengthening unemployment. Matching-function heterogeneity plausibly generates a negative relationship between the UI effect on unemployment durations and wages. This relationship holds empirically within our sample and across prior studies, reconciling disparate wage-effect estimates in the literature. Empirically, UI raises wages by improving reemployment firm quality and attenuating wage drops. paper jointly with Arash Nekoei and Gaming and Strategic Opacity in Incentive Provision<http://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/Users/Meyer/ehm4nov14.pdf> (Margaret Meyer) Abstract: It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments in a two-task moral hazard model in which the agent is privately informed about which task is less costly for him. We examine two simple classes of incentive scheme that are "opaque" in that they make the agent uncertain ex ante about the incentive coefficients in the linear payment rule. Relative to transparent menus of linear contracts, these opaque schemes induce more balanced efforts, but also impose more risk on the agent per unit of aggregate effort induced. We identify settings in which optimally designed opaque schemes not only strictly dominate the best transparent menu but also eliminate the efficiency losses from the agent's hidden information. Opaque schemes are more likely to be preferred to transparent ones when i) efforts on the tasks are highly complementary for the principal; ii) the agent's privately known preference between the tasks is weak; iii) the agent's risk aversion is significant; and iv) the errors in measuring performance have large correlation or small variance. We are looking forward to seeing you! 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