CEO Library

The paper documents key patterns of community-level disparities in access to unemployment insurance (UI) during the pandemic. To operationalize the notion of access to UI, researchers rely on a comprehensive conceptual framework that allows them to track a jobless worker’s access to UI benefits across three discrete stages in the lifecycle of a potential UI claim. To document the degrees of disparities in access throughout the lifecycle of a UI claim, the analysis develops and compares measures for each stage of access both across states and at more local levels within California.

In the paper, using data from before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, the researchers show that the expansion of benefits under the CARES Act only modestly increased self-reported unemployment insurance (UI) recipiency among UI eligible workers, from 27% in 2018 to 36% in 2020/2021. They find that the same demographic groups that historically are less likely to report receiving benefits (less educated, younger, and racial and ethnic minorities) continued to be less likely to receive benefits during the pandemic.

The report presents findings from the Unemployment Insurance (UI) Deficit Financing Study. While the study is retrospective in nature, the report is designed to inform states’ decision making about UI-related borrowing activities in the future, discusses the rationale for the study, the research questions addressed and methods used, and a roadmap for the report.

In 2018, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to fund contractor The Urban Institute to design and conduct an evaluation that examines critical policy issues, lessons learned, and challenges states faced administering Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs during the Great Recession that began in 2007 and the economic recovery that followed.

In 2018, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) to fund contractor The Urban Institute to design and conduct an evaluation that examines critical policy issues, lessons learned, and challenges states faced administering Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs during the Great Recession that began in 2007 and the economic recovery that followed. Additionally, the opportunity to study these topics as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic was incorporated into the study.

The toolkit provides a basic overview of evaluation elements for program management purposes. It also draws from and provides information about other generally accepted and available evaluation resources that may be useful as an entry point for state Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) programs that may not make full use of evaluations in program planning or implementation or that may need additional evaluation reference to expand their evaluation activities.

The Evaluation of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program aimed to estimate the impact of the U.S. Department of Labor’s REA program, which supported states to address the reemployment needs of Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants and to prevent and detect UI improper payments. The evaluation included both an implementation study and an impact study. The report presents the results of the impact study.

The body of the Evaluation of Impacts of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program Impact Report is deliberately brief. This separate appendix volume provides additional detail. Appendix A develops a formal economic theory of REA-like programs. Appendix B provides additional detail on the econometric specification and other estimation issues.

The Evaluation of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program was designed to estimate the impact of the REA program on Unemployment Insurance (UI) duration (the length of time claimants spent on UI, in weeks), employment, and earnings. The evaluation was conducted in four states—Indiana, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin— and included both an implementation study and a large impact study. The brief summarizes the results of the impact study, which randomly assigned more than a quarter of a million UI claimants in a multi-armed design over a one-year period.

The brief describes methodological lessons from Evaluation of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program impact study that may inform future evaluations of reemployment interventions.

In 2020, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration (ETA) and funded contractor Mathematica Policy Research to conduct the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) Research Portfolio Project.

The literature review summarizes key challenges and strategies of states operating unemployment insurance (UI) programs during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Except when noted otherwise, “states” is used to refer to the 53 UI jurisdictions in the United States. This includes the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. It is based on a targeted literature review for the U.S.

Research indicates that individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and class origins tend to differ in their unemployment rates. We know less, however, about whether these differences result from the different groups’ unequal risks of entering or exiting unemployment, and even less about how economic fluctuations moderate the ethnoracial and class-origin gaps in the long term risks of transitioning into and out of unemployment.

The state-Federal system of Unemployment Insurance (UI) programs has existed for 80 years. The programs in the states are financed by employer payroll taxes paid into state trust fund accounts maintained at the U.S. Treasury. These accounts are the source for benefit payments made to eligible unemployed workers.

In 2018, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) funded Mathematica Policy Research to conduct Data on Earnings: A Review of Resources for Research under the Administrative Data Research and Analysis portfolio of studies. This secondary data review describes data sources on wages and earnings that may be used by researchers who wish to incorporate reports of earned income in their analyses but original data collection is not feasible.

The brief presents findings on the effects of 12-month information campaigns designed to increase employer awareness of Short-Time Compensation (STC) programs in Iowa and Oregon. The states ran their campaigns starting in mid-September 2014 in Iowa and late October 2014 in Oregon, and researchers tested the effects of this outreach using a random controlled trial (RCT) design in Iowa and the Portland metropolitan area of Oregon and a quasi-experimental design (QED) in Oregon outside of Portland.

Short-time compensation (STC), also known as work sharing, is an optional program within some state unemployment insurance systems. Under STC, employers experiencing a temporary reduction in business lower the average hours of employees in lieu of laying off workers. Employees whose hours are lowered receive Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits in proportion to the reduction in their hours, while businesses retain valued employees and avoid future recruitment and training costs.

The report of the Evaluation of the Reemployment and Eligibility Assessment (REA) Program, and as a precursor to an impact study analysis, describes the implementation of the REA program in the four states in which the evaluation study was conducted: Indiana, New York, Washington, and Wisconsin. This report and its analysis support the broader impact evaluation in two distinct ways. Most important, this report describes in detail the REA program as it was implemented across the four participating states during the study period.

Individuals who lose their jobs may have the skills and desire to start their own businesses. Some states have taken action to help unemployed workers create their own jobs by establishing Self-Employment Assistance (SEA) programs, which allow Unemployment Insurance (UI) eligible individuals who meet SEA program requirements to receive a weekly self-employment allowance while they are setting up their businesses. This allowance is equal in amount and duration to regular UI benefits.

A main goal of the U.S. Unemployment Insurance (UI) program is to provide temporary income support to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own. Benefits supply only partial wage replacement and are time-limited, so as to balance providing income support during unemployment and preserving incentives for benefit recipients to return to work. Most UI claimants who begin receiving benefits during non-recessionary periods can collect them for up to 26 weeks.

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) program was designed to reduce financial hardships for unemployed workers, assist with reemployment, and ameliorate the negative effects of unemployment on the economy as a whole. The loss of a job poses major hardships for many workers and their families. They often need to begin a potentially challenging search for new employment and also adjust their spending patterns and seek other sources of income. For qualified unemployed workers, UI benefits can help reduce the urgency for such adjustments.

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The recession that began in late 2007 posed major challenges for the U.S. labor market, including a high unemployment rate and a steep increase in unemployment durations. The federal policy response to the recession and the lingering weak labor market included substantial changes to the unemployment compensation (UC) system, which is administered as a partnership between states and the federal government. Twelve pieces of federal legislation affected the UC system from June 2008 to January 2013, the most comprehensive of which was the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA).

The report examines expansions to the unemployment compensation system that followed the onset of the Great Recession. Before the recession, eligible workers losing a job could collect up to 26 weeks of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in most states. Near the end of 2009, up to 99 weeks were available in high-unemployment states through the UI program, the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008 (EUC08) program, and the Extended Benefits (EB) program. The researchers' main analysis used administrative and survey data on 2,122 recipients in 12 states.

Typically, unemployed workers who have met their state’s eligibility criteria for benefits can receive up to 26 weeks of unemployment benefits, which are intended to provide a financial cushion while the workers adapt to the loss of a job and household income. These state-funded benefits, often referred to as regular Unemployment Insurance (UI), are available regardless of the strength of the economy.