Unemployment benefits and job match quality

Unemployment insurance schemes face a well-known trade-off between providing income support to those out of work and reducing their incentive to look for work. This trade-off between benefits and incentives is central to the public debate about extending benefit periods during the recent economic crisis. Often overlooked in this debate is that such support can increase the quality of the work found by the unemployed. This quality rise, in terms of both wages and duration, can be achieved by increasing the time and resources available to an individual to obtain a better job.