Do Unemployment Insurance Recipients Actively Seek Work? Randomized Trials in Four U.S. States
28 Pages Posted: 29 Mar 1999 Last revised: 3 Apr 2022
Date Written: February 1999
Abstract
In the last two decades, U.S. policies have moved from the use of incentives to the use of sanctions to promote work effort in social programs. Surprisingly, except for anecdotes, there is very little systematic evidence of the extent to which sanctions applied to the abusive use of social entitlements result in greater work effort. In this paper we report the results of randomized trials designed to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment (UI) claims and benefits. These experiments were designed to explicitly test claims based on non-experimental data failure of claimants to actively seek work. Our results provide no support for the view that the failure to actively seek work has been a cause of overpayment in the UI system.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
By Jaap H. Abbring, Gerard J. Van Den Berg, ...
-
The Effect of Benefit Sanctions on the Duration of Unemployment
By Rafael Lalive, Jan C. Van Ours, ...
-
The Effect of Benefit Sanctions on the Duration of Unemployment
By Rafael Lalive, Jan C. Van Ours, ...
-
By Dan Black, Jeffrey A. Smith, ...
-
Improving Incentives in Unemployment Insurance: A Review of Recent Research
By Peter Fredriksson and Bertil Holmlund
-
Education and Unemployment of Women
By Jacob Mincer
-
Optimal Unemployment Insurance with Monitoring and Sanctions
By Jan Boone, Peter Fredriksson, ...