Unemployment Insurance and Means-Tested Program Interactions: Evidence from Administrative Data | Zendy

Pauline Leung | Zendy; Christopher J. O’Leary | Zendy

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Unemployment Insurance and Means-Tested Program Interactions: Evidence from Administrative Data

Author(s) -

Pauline Leung,

Christopher J. O’Leary

Publication year - 2020

Publication title -

american economic journal economic policy

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 7.868

H-Index - 62

eISSN - 1945-7731

pISSN - 1945-774X

DOI - 10.1257/pol.20170262

Subject(s) - receipt , earnings , unemployment , layoff , welfare , quarter (canadian coin) , safety net , demographic economics , medicaid , population , labour economics , social insurance , business , economics , accounting , demography , political science , economic growth , sociology , geography , market economy , health care , archaeology , law

We study the ways in which unemployment insurance (UI) benefits interact with other elements of the social safety net around job losses. We exploit a cutoff for UI eligibility, based on a workers' highest quarterly earnings in the past year, to generate quasi-experimental variation in UI receipt. We find that UI receipt cuts welfare (TANF) receipt by half among low-earning UI applicants but has no impact on SNAP or Medicaid usage. However, because welfare participation is low in this population, overall crowdout is small. In the quarter following layoff, UI increases total income by 55 percent (including labor earnings and transfers).

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