We are pleased to introduce this volume of papers, all of which were presented at a conference in honor of JohnDiNardo held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in September 2018. After battling leukemia for close to a decade, John left us on August 26, 2017, at the age of 56. The conference was an opportunity for colleagues, coauthors, students, and friends to celebrate John’s life and academic achievements. The proud son of Italian immigrants, John was born and raised in Allen Park, Michigan. He spent most of his academic career at his alma mater, the University of Michigan, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a masters of public policy. After completing his PhD at Princeton in 1990, John spent a year at the RAND Corporation before joining the faculty at the University of California, Irvine, in 1991. He moved back to Michigan in 2001, where he spent the remainder of his career. At this point, convention calls for a discussion of the main research contributions of the scholar being honored, followed by a summary of the contributed papers. However, following convention is not what best describes John DiNardo’s life and career. Armed with a trademark irreverence, a

Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary “decomposition” approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy’s total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program’s implicit earnings tax.