In all OECD countries, Mandatory Notice (MN) policies require firms to inform workers in advance of a layoff. In our theoretical framework, MN helps workers to avoid unemployment and find better jobs by searching for a new job while still employed. This increases future production. The magnitude of this production gain depends on the relative effectiveness of search while employed versus unemployed. But on-the-job search and diminished work incentives reduce current production. If future gains outweigh production losses, MN extensions improve production efficiency. If not, Coasian bargaining predicts that firms offer larger severance instead of longer advance notice when MN is extended. With bargaining, the sole efficiency loss of MN is due to delayed separations of unproductive job matches. We test these predictions using novel Swedish administrative data on layoff notifications. Workers eligible for extended MN receive longer advance notice and larger severance, resulting in shorter non-employment spells and higher-paying jobs. We then disentangle the effects of longer notice versus severance. Longer advance notice causes workers to both engage in fewer job search activities while still finding better-paying jobs without delay, while larger severance delays job finding. Advance notice thus replaces job search while unemployed with more effective search while employed. We then gauge the production loss of MN by estimating the impact of notice on workers’ productivity and the loss due to delayed separations. Finally, we evaluate the overall production efficiency implications of MN by combining the empirical estimates of production gains and losses with our theory. In our ssetting, the production gains of MN seem to outweigh the losses.

We study the importance of caseworkers and their role in supporting unemployed job seekers. By exploiting as-if random variation, arising from job seekers in Sweden being assigned to caseworkers based on their date of birth, we estimate caseworker value-added along several dimensions. We show that caseworkers have meaningful effects on both job seekers' time in unemployment and subsequent job quality. These effects also impact job seekers' long-run outcomes and are heterogeneous across groups of job seekers. We find only weak trade-offs between different dimensions of value added. Leveraging detailed administrative data on both caseworkers and job seekers, we document that experienced caseworkers perform better than their less experienced counterparts. Caseworker work-strategies are important in determining value added, and matching caseworkers to job seekers based on previous labor-market experiences lead to better outcomes.

Previous studies estimating the effect of generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) on unemployment duration has found that as job-seekers approach benefit exhaustion the probability of leaving unemployment increases sharply. Such ``spikes'' in the hazard rate has generally been interpreted as shirking among job-seekers timing their employment to coincide with benefit exhaustion. This, however, has been called into question by Card et al. (2007b) who claim that such spikes rather reflect flight out of the labor force as benefits run out. This paper revisits this debate by studying a 30 week UI benefit extension in Sweden and its effects on unemployment duration, duration on UI as well as the timing of employment. As the UI extension is predicated upon a job-seeker having a child below the age of 18 at the time of regular UI exhaustion this provides quasi-experimental variation which I exploit using a regression discontinuity design. I find that although increasing potential UI duration by 30 weeks increases actual take up by about 2.7 weeks, overall duration in unemployment and the probability of employment is largely unaffected. Moreover, I find no evidence of job-seekers manipulating the hazard to employment such that it coincides with UI benefit exhaustion.