The Impact of Unemployment Insurance Generosity on Match Quality Distribution

This paper investigates the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) generosity on the distribution of match tenure. We show that more generous UI increases expected tenure, reducing the mass of the lower tail of match duration and increasing the duration of matches available. This impact is differentiated across education levels, with the larger benefits accruing to the less educated.

Evaluating Job Search Programs for Old and Young Individuals: Heterogeneous Impact on Unemployment Duration

This paper exploits an area-based pilot experiment to identify average treatment effects on unemployment duration of treated individuals of two active labor market programs implemented in Portugal. We focus on the short-term heterogeneous impact on two subpopulations of unemployed individuals: young (targeted by the Inserjovem program) and old (targeted by the Reage program). We show that the latter program has a small and positive impact (reduction) on unemployment duration of workers finding a job upon participation, whereas the impact of Inserjovem is generally negative (extended durations). These results are robust to a wide variety of constructions of quasi-experimental settings and estimators. The identification of heterogeneous effects showed that the program results were less satisfactory for young workers, for those over 40 and for the less educated. Women also benefited less from the programs. The results seem to improve slightly for young workers in the 2nd semester of implementation, but they deteriorate in the medium term. The lack of wage subsidies in the Portuguese programs may explain the minor impacts obtained, when compared to similar programs

Neoliberalism and patterns of economic performance: 1980 to 2000

Neoliberal discourse often produces the impression that the world has undergone a wholesale shift toward laissez-faire and that this shift has produced economic prosperity. This article examines national economic data to discern the degree to which (1) governments have in fact retreated from the market and (2) countries have enjoyed increasing economic prosperity over a period in which they have supposedly been liberalizing. The evidence is mixed on both counts. Although international capital mobility and trade liberalism appears to have grown over the past two decades, there is little evidence of a broad scaling back of governments. Over the same period, countries have not experienced any appreciable improvement in growth, cross-national equality, employment, or national debt loads, although there is some evidence of improved price stability near the end of the 1990s.trade; neoliberalism; structural adjustment; Latin America; economy; transfers; budget; spending

Excess Worker Turnover and Fixed-Term Contracts: Causal Evidence in a Two-Tier System

Portuguese firms engage in intense reallocation, most employers simultaneously hire and separate from workers, resulting in high excess worker turnover flows. These flows are constrained by the employment protection gap between open-ended and fixed-term contracts. We explore a reform that increased the employment protection of open-ended contracts and generated a quasi-experiment. The causal evidence points to an increase in the share and in the excess turnover of fixed-term contracts in treated firms. The excess turnover of open-ended contracts remained unchanged. This result is consistent with a high degree of substitution between open-ended and fixed-term contracts. At the firm level, we also show that excess turnover is quite heterogeneous and quantify its association with firm, match, and worker characteristics.excess worker turnover, two-tier systems, quasi-experiment, fixed-term contracts

Enhanced Representative Days and System States Modeling for Energy Storage Investment Analysis

This paper analyzes different models for evaluating investments in Energy Storage Systems (ESS) in power systems with high penetration of Renewable Energy Sources (RES). First of all, two methodologies proposed in the literature are extended to consider ESS investment: a unit commitment model that uses the System States (SS) method of representing time; and another one that uses a representative periods (RP) method. Besides, this paper proposes two new models that improve the previous ones without a significant increase of computation time. The enhanced models are the System States Reduced Frequency Matrix (SS-RFM) model which addresses short-term energy storage more approximately than the SS method to reduce the number of constraints in the problem, and the Representative Periods with Transition Matrix and Cluster Indices (RP-TM&CI) model which guarantees some continuity between representative periods, e.g. days, and introduces long-term storage into a model originally designed only for the short term. All these models are compared using an hourly unit commitment model as benchmark. While both system state models provide an excellent representation of long-term storage, their representation of short-term storage is frequently unrealistic. The RP-TM&CI model, on the other hand, succeeds in approximating both short- and long-term storage, which leads to almost 10 times lower error in storage investment results in comparison to the other models analyzed

When Supply Meets Demand: Wage Inequality in Portugal

Wage inequality in Portugal increased over the last quarter of century. The period from 1982 to 1995 witnessed strong increases in both upper- and lower-tail inequality. A shortage of skills combined with skill-biased technological changes are at the core of this evolution. Since 1995, lower-tail inequality decreased, while upper-tail inequality increased at a slower rate. The supply of high-skilled workers more than doubled during this period, contributing significantly to the slowdown. Polarization of employment demand is the more credible explanation for the more recent evolution. As in other developed economies, for instance Germany and the United States, we show that institutions played a minor role in shaping changes in inequality.inequality, polarization, supply, demand, institutions

Estimating Relevant Portion of Stability Region using Lyapunov Approach and Sum of Squares

Traditional Lyapunov based transient stability assessment approaches focus on identifying the stability region (SR) of the equilibrium point under study. When trying to estimate this region using Lyapunov functions, the shape of the final estimate is often limited by the degree of the function chosen, a limitation that results in conservativeness in the estimate of the SR. More conservative the estimate is in a particular region of state space, smaller is the estimate of the critical clearing time for disturbances that drive the system towards that region. In order to reduce this conservativeness, we propose a methodology that uses the disturbance trajectory data to skew the shape of the final Lyapunov based SR estimate. We exploit the advances made in the theory of sum of squares decomposition to algorithmically estimate this region. The effectiveness of this technique is demonstrated on a power systems classical model.Comment: Under review as a conference paper at IEEE PESGM 201