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While it is becoming a key issue in politics, the question of job protection for SME owner-managers remains unaddressed in academic research. This article presents the first study of the benefits of an unemployment insurance scheme for entrepreneurs after a firm failure. To this end, we rely on a survey of 186 SME owner-managers who experienced failure between 1999 and 2015. Our main results suggest that owner-managers who have taken out unemployment insurance have between a 21.4 percent and 48.2 percent higher chance of bouncing back after failure by creating a new business.