UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines interactions between the unemployment insurance system, the tax system, and the labor market in the United States. It focuses primarily on how these major government policies affect individual decisions, particularly viewed through households' financial constraints and available liquidity. The dissertation conducts several novel reassessments of how individuals respond to key components of the tax and social insurance system, generating new economic evidence to inform potential policy reform. The chapters offer both causal and descriptive evidence and build on previous economic research in the fields of public economics, labor economics, and household finance. Overall, the dissertation highlights the importance of using well-identified micro-level natural experiments for evaluating the impacts of government policy.