Unemployment insurance recipients and nonrecipients in the CPS

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 132, Issue 10, 2009, Pages 44-53

  Vroman, Wayne ^a  

^a URBAN INSTITUTE   (United States)

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EID: 77949334480     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (15)

1. The recipiency rate is the ratio of weekly UI beneficiaries to weekly total unemployment. Among the 21 high-income countries that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the median UI recipiency rate during the 2000-04 timespan was 0.875; during the same period, recipiency in the United States averaged 0.391, less than half the median of the 21 countries' rates. Of these countries, only Greece and Japan had lower recipiency rates than the United States.
2. Three papers that summarize the first three CPS supplements from 1976, 1989, and 1993 are the following: Carl Rosenfeld, "Job search of the unemployed, May 1976," Monthly Labor Review, November 1977, pp. 39-43
3. Wayne Vroman, "The Decline in Unemployment Insurance Claims Activity in the 1980s," Unemployment Insurance Occasional Paper 91-2, (Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, 1991)
4. Stephen Wandner and Andrew Stettner, "Why are many jobless workers not applying for benefits?" Monthly Labor Review, June 2000), pp. 21-32.
5. See Wayne Vroman, "An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Non-Filers: 2005 CPS Supplement Results," Occasional Paper 2009-7, (Washington, DC, U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, 2009).
6. The eight questions are shown in the appendix of this article
7. According to the UI program data, applicants for unemployment insurance (collectively referred to as "insured unemployment") were 34.4 percent of total unemployment in 2005.
8. In UI program data for 2005, the difference between the sexes was slightly larger. The insured-employment-to-uninsured-employment ratio was 0.324 for women and 0.366 for men.
9. UI program data on nonmonetary decisions involving voluntary quits in 2005 indicate a denial rate of 0.73.
10. Some form of temporary Federal benefit program has been enacted in every recession since 1958. Federal-State Extended Benefits also were paid in 1993 in Oregon, Puerto Rico, and Washington State.
11. The Supplemental Unemployment Assistance program paid benefits to people regardless of their eligibility for regular UI. Usually, emergency and extended benefit programs pay benefits only to people who have already exhausted their entitlement to regular UI benefits. The Supplemental Unemployment Assistance program served many individuals with low and/or intermittent earnings histories and employees of nonprofit organizations and the government who were not covered by UI at the time.
12. The only exception to this generalization is women reentrants. In this category, the 2005 average of 12.3 percent is only marginally higher than the 1993 average of 10.4 percent.
13. Eligibility was extended to people who previously had worked in noncovered sectors and to some who did not satisfy other eligibility criteria for the regular UI program
14. In UI program data for 2005, the ratio of first payments to new initial claims is 0.757.
15. The regression analysis is discussed in Section 7 and Appendix B of Vroman, "An Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Non-Filers."