Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Severance Insurance

I thought that maybe I was getting a little carried away with the whole concept of severance insurance (either financial or service) and decided to take a few days and poke around in academia to see if any smart academic type was out there thinking along the same lines. Guess what? There are.

As a matter of fact, the relevant literature goes back to 1996 when a guy named George E. Rejda (V.J. Skutt Distinguished Professor of Insurance at the University of Nebraska) wrote a paper, UNEMPLOYMENT COMPENSATION: A PROPOSAL FOR AN OPTIONAL SYSTEM OF SELF-INSURANCE. I quote from the abstract, "The author believes state unemployment compensation programs are inefficient public monopolies that are not subject to competition."
Now admittedly George was coming from a slightly different direction, but his premise was identical to mine. I quote further from his Abstarct, "As a result (of providing an alternative), the cost of providing benefits to unemployed workers may be reduced for many employers..."

There is another paper written in 2005 by Donald O. Parsons from Department of Economics at George Washington University entitled, BENEFIT GENEROSITY IN VOLUNTARY SEVERANCE PLANS: THE U.S. EXPERIENCE. What is interesting about this paper is that it cites studies done by Right and Lee Hecht Harrison that basically confirm the formulaic approach to severance plan benefits. The paper further posits (at least as I read it) that voluntary programs would (i) end up costing more, "induce firing costs" and (ii) be less generous, "benefit generosity is likely to be limited". Well, give the guy some credit, at least he's got his fingers on the right places to look, if you're a corporation trying to save money. But his conclusion is weighed down by what I would call the typical excuses for why severance funding can't be done (i) differently, (ii) fairly and (iii) more economically. He is basically saying that a different kind of severance would cost more and provide lower benefits. How creative!

Severance Insurance can be real. What I now know is that there are people out there working on an alternative, e.g., the Callen patent. What I don't know is who are they (other than Callen)?

I know I'm not alone. I've just got to find the players and bring their ideas to the surface.

willy

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