Unemployment programs tend to increase the length of time employees spend out of work

See Krueger vs. Obama, WSJ, 8-30-11. Excerpts:

"President Obama yesterday tapped Alan Krueger of Princeton to be his new chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers,..."

"Here is what Mr. Krueger wrote in a study with Bruce D. Meyer for the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper series in 2002: ...The empirical work on unemployment insurance (UI) and workers' compensation (WC) insurance finds that the programs tend to increase the length of time employees spend out of work.""

"...the incentive effects of unemployment insurance on recipients to delay finding a job are not insignificant and that "the estimates of the elasticities of lost work time that incorporate both the incidence and duration of claims are close to 1.0 for unemployment insurance.""

"... paying people not to work increases the incentive not to work and thus tends to encourage longer periods of joblessness."

"As recently as 2008, Mr. Krueger also found negative effects from making unemployment insurance more generous. In "Job Search and Unemployment Insurance: New Evidence from Time Use Data," he wrote that "across the 50 states and D.C., job search is inversely related to the generosity of unemployment benefits, with an elasticity between -1.6 and -2.2.""

"...the share of the jobless who are out work for six months or more is 44.4%—an extraordinarily high share by historical standards and which has coincided with Mr. Obama's benefits expansion."