Do unemployment insurance recipients actively seek work? Evidence from randomized trials in four U.S. States [An article from: Journal of Econometrics]

This digital document is a journal article from Journal of Econometrics, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
In this paper, we report the results of the only field test of which we are aware that uses randomized trials to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment claims and benefits paid in the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) program. These experiments, which were implemented in four U.S. sites in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and Tennessee, were designed to explicitly test claims based on nonexperimental data, summarized in Burgess and Kingston (An Incentives Approach to Improving the Unemployment Compensation System, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1987), that a prime cause of overpayments is the failure of claimants to actively seek work. Our results provide no support for the view that the failure to actively search for work has been a cause of overpayment in the UI system.