scholarly journals Unemployment Insurance and Job Search in the Great Recession

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Rothstein
2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (5) ◽  
pp. 314-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christiaan Luigjes ◽  
Georg Fischer ◽  
Frank Vandenbroucke

Abstract The system of unemployment insurance (UI) used in the United States has often been cited as a model for Europe. The American model illustrates that it is possible to create and maintain a UI system based on federal-state co-financing that intensifies during economic crises and thus reinforces protection and stabilisation. Central requirements and conditional funding can improve the aggregate protection and stabilisation capacity of the system. However, the architecture of the US system financially incentivises states to organise retrenchment of their own efforts for UI, which in turn leads to a divergence of benefit generosity and coverage levels. During the Great Recession, the federal government mitigated these incentives for retrenchment through minimum requirements attached to federal financial intervention. With regards to the European unemployment re-insurance system debate, the US experience implies both positive and encourageing conclusions and cautionary lessons.


Author(s):  
Stephen A. Woodbury

Unemployment insurance (UI) provides temporary income support to workers who have lost their jobs and are seeking reemployment. This chapter reviews the origins of the federal-state UI system in the United States and outlines its principles and goals. It also describes the conditions for benefit eligibility, the benefits themselves, and their financing. The UI system is complex and includes many interested parties, including employers, worker advocates, state UI administrators, and the federal government. These parties’ differing views have led to controversies over benefit eligibility, adequacy, and whether the states or federal government should bear primary responsibility for UI. The Great Recession caused most states’ UI trust funds to become insolvent and led to renewed debate over the structure and financing of the system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 252 ◽  
pp. R52-R69 ◽  
Author(s):  
David N.F. Bell ◽  
David G. Blanchflower

We examine labour market performance in the US and the UK prior to the onset of the Covid-19 crash. We then track the changes that have occurred in the months and days from the beginning of March 2020 using what we call the Economics of Walking About (EWA) that shows a collapse twenty times faster and much deeper than the Great Recession. We examine unemployment insurance claims by state by day in the US as well as weekly national data. We track the distributional impact of the shock and show that already it is hitting the most vulnerable groups who are least able to work from home the hardest – the young, the least educated and minorities. We have no official labour market data for the UK past January but see evidence that job placements have fallen sharply. We report findings from an online poll fielded from 11–16 April 2020 showing that a third of workers in Canada and the US report that they have lost at least half of their income due to the Covid-19 crisis, compared with a quarter in the UK and 45 per cent in China. We estimate that the unemployment rate in the US is around 20 per cent in April. It is hard to know what it is in the UK given the paucity of data, but it has gone up a lot.


2015 ◽  
Vol 105 (5) ◽  
pp. 171-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry S. Farber ◽  
Jesse Rothstein ◽  
Robert G. Valletta

Unemployment Insurance benefit durations were extended during the Great Recession, reaching 99 weeks for most recipients. The extensions were rolled back and eventually terminated by the end of 2013. Using matched CPS data from 2008-2014, we estimate the effect of extended benefits on unemployment exits separately during the earlier period of benefit expansion and the later period of rollback. In both periods, we find little or no effect on job-finding but a reduction in labor force exits due to benefit availability. We estimate that the rollbacks reduced the labor force participation rate by about 0.1 percentage point in early 2014.


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