> The University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz found that for every week that unemployment benefits are extended, the average duration of unemployment goes up by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks. According to a paper coauthored by Alan Krueger, President Obama’s Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, the unemployed more than triple the time they spend job-hunting, from 20 minutes per week to 70 minutes per week, in the weeks right before benefits expire.
The referenced papers (which aren't actually referenced) are hard to find.
I did find this though:
One of the best-known empirical results in public Önance and labor economics is the ìspikeî
in the exit rate from unemployment around the expiration of jobless beneÖts (see e.g., Robert
Mo¢ tt, 1985; Lawrence Katz and Bruce Meyer, 1990a; Katz and Meyer, 1990b). This sharp
surge in the hazard rate is widely interpreted as evidence that recipients are waiting until their
beneÖts run out to return to work
However, from the same paper:
Our main finding is that the way in which unemployment
spells are measured has a large e§ect on the magnitude of the spike at exhaustion, both in
existing studies and in our Austrian data...
We conclude that most job seekers in Austria are not waiting to return to work until their
UI benefits are exhausted. Rather, a large fraction simply leave the unemployment registry
once their benefits end and they are no longer required to register to maintain their eligibility
for benefit
> tax credit for low-income families who have children ... low-income birth rate increases
Citations please