Unemployment benefits don’t discourage people from finding work: study

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/12/05/unemployment-benefits-dont-discourage-people-from-finding-work-study/



A new study shows that even generous unemployment benefits have zero impact on people’s drive to go out and find a job.

The multinational study, conducted by Jan Eichhorn, a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh, and published in the October issue of Social Indicators Research ($$), discredits what many see as conventional wisdom. During a floor debate over extending benefits for the long-term unemployed, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona put it directly: “Continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work.”

Not so, Eichhorn reports. Although he found that the well-being of the unemployed varied dramatically from country to country according to various economic and demographic variables, the key finding was that the generosity of unemployment benefits had no effect at all on people’s drive to go out and try to find a job. “This means that claims about unemployment benefits resulting in complacent unemployed people who chose the situation and would be satisfied with it cannot be retained uncritically,” he wrote.

(Eichhorn used data from the European Values Study – a large-scale database of public opinion data tracking what Europeans believe about family life, work, religion and society – and paired it with economic data from the 15 core countries of the European Union and Norway. Most of the countries Eichhorn studied offer their citizens much more substantial benefits than Americans enjoy when they lose a job.)