|
Working
Paper Series:
07.08
Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Unemployment Insurance
from New York State
Bruce D. Meyer and Wallace K. C. Mok
http://www.harrisschool.uchicago.edu/faculty/web-pages/bruce-meyer.asp
Abstract:
This paper examines unemployment duration and the incidence of claims following a 36 percent
increase in the maximum weekly benefit in New York State. This benefit increase sharply
increased benefits for a large group of claimants, while leaving them unchanged for a large share
of claimants who provide a natural comparison group. The New York benefit increase has the
special features that it was unexpected and applied to in-progress spells. These features allow the
effects on duration to be convincingly separated from effects on incidence. The results show a
sharp fall in the hazard of leaving UI that coincides with the increase in benefits. The evidence is
also consistent with a substantial effect of the benefit level on the incidence of claims and with
this change in incidence biasing duration estimates. The evidence further suggests that, at least
in this case, standard methods that identify duration effects through nonlinearities in the benefit
schedule are not badly biased.
The complete
document may be downloaded or viewed using Adobe
Acrobat Reader. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat
Reader, you can download
it from Adobe.
|
