Resource Library

The brief summarizes the state of the evidence for individualized career services—a category of reemployment services—to help unemployment insurance (UI) claimants return to work. This brief closes with a discussion of gaps in the current evidence base and implications of evaluating these kinds of Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program components.

The 2018 amendments to the Social Security Act (hereafter “the Statute”) permanently authorized the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) program, required that states’ programs be supported by evidence, and allowed states to use up to 10 percent of their RESEA grant for evaluations. Developed as part of the Evaluation to Advance RESEA Program Evidence, the evidence-building options report aims to serve as a resource for decision makers to understand and weigh options for developing evidence of various types.

In 2019, the Chief Evaluation Office (CEO) partnered with the Employment and Training Administration, Office of Unemployment Insurance (OUI) to conduct the Behavioral Interventions to Improve Work Search Among Unemployment Insurance Claimants project. The unemployment insurance (UI) program requires claimants to be actively looking for work while they receive benefits to encourage a rapid return to work.

The report of impact evaluations aimed to assess the effectiveness of behaviorally-informed communications – such as a pop-up alert and emails – in increasing unemployment insurance (UI) claimants’ compliance with work search requirements.

States participating in the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program use evaluation evidence to continually improve their RESEA programs. The list is an array of resources that states can draw on to support their efforts to grow their capacity, to use existing evaluation evidence, and to develop new evidence. This list is organized by resource type. Some resources are narrowly targeted to a single topic while others cover a multitude of topics.

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.