Unemployment insurance participation by education and by race and ethnicity

Monthly Labor Review

Volumn 135, Issue 10, 2012, Pages 28-41

  Gould Werth, Alix ^a   Luke Shaefer, H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871577911     PISSN: 00981818     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. See Stephen A. Wandner and Andrew Stettner, "Why are many jobless workers not applying for benefits?" Monthly Labor Review, June 2000, pp. 21-33, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/06/art2full.pdf
2. Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Income Security and Family Support, Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, Unemployment Insurance: Low-Wage and Part-Time Workers Continue to Experience Low Rates of Receipt, GAO 07-1147 (U.S. Government Accountability Office, September 2007).
3. George Wentworth, "Unemployment Insurance at 75: Assessing Benefit Eligibility, Adequacy and Duration," PowerPoint presentation given at the NASWA UI Directors/Legal Affairs Conference, Washington, DC, Oct. 19, 2010.
4. See Andrew Grant-Thomas, "Why Are African Americans and Latinos Underrepresented Among Recipients of Unemployment Insurance and What Should we Do About It?" Poverty & Race, May 1, 2011, pp. 8-11.
5. H. Luke Shaefer, "Identifying Key Barriers to Unemployment Insurance for Disadvantaged Workers in the United States," Journal of Social Policy, July 2010, pp. 439-460.
6. Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth and Social Policy in America (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 2009).
7. See Grant-Thomas, "Why Are African Americans and Latinos Underrepresented".
8. Shaefer, "Identifying Key Barriers."
9. Also called "earnings requirements."
10. Monetary incentives included in the UI Modernization Act, which was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (123 Stat. 115), led some states to relax their nonmonetary requirements, making eligible those who quit for "compelling family reasons," among which are to avoid domestic violence, to care for an immediate family member who is ill or disabled, and to relocate to another state because of a spouse's employment situation.
11. See Shaefer, "Identifying Key Barriers".
12. Report to the Chairman, Unemployment Insurance
13. Grant-Thomas, "Why Are African Americans and Latinos Underrepresented."
14. See Report to the Chairman, Subcommittee on Human Resources, Committee on Ways and Means, House of Representatives, Unemployment Insurance: Factors Associated with Benefit Receipt, GAO 06-341 (U.S. Government Accountability Office, March 2006).
15. Shaefer, "Identifying Key Barriers."
16. See Benjamin Keys and Sheldon Danziger, "The Risk of Unemployment among Disadvantaged and Advantaged Male Workers, 1968-2003," in Katherine S. Newman, ed., Laid Off, Laid Low: Political and Economic Consequences of Employment Insecurity (New York, Columbia University Press, 2008), pp. 56-73.
17. Robert W. Fairlie and Lori G. Kletzer, "Jobs Lost, Jobs Regained: An Analysis of Black/White Differences in Job Displacement in the 1980s," Industrial Relations, October 1998, pp. 460-477.
18. Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red.
19. There are 332 job leavers in the sample, constituting 18.3 percent of the total sample.
20. See Wayne Vroman, "Unemployment insurance recipients and nonrecipients in the CPS," Monthly Labor Review, October 2009, pp. 44-53, http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/10/art4full.pdf.
21. See Rob Valetta and Katherine Kuang, "Extended Unemployment and UI Benefits," FRBSF Economic Letter, Apr. 19, 2010.
22. Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller, "Job search and unemployment insurance: New evidence from time use data," Journal of Public Economics, pp. 298-307.
23. There are 902 reentrants between the ages of 18 and 64 in the 2005 CPS UI Non-Filers Supplement, compared with a combined 1,910 job leavers and job losers, of which 1,816 had no missing information in response to the survey question "Did you apply for UI?" If included, reentrants would constitute one-third of the sample, and the heterogeneity in the group could seriously affect the results of the analysis.
24. Respondents who indicated that they were of Hispanic ethnicity were coded as Hispanic rather than members of the racial group they indicated. In the sample, 7 Hispanic respondents indicated that they were Black, 200 indicated that they were White, and 16 indicated that they were of another race.
25. Immigrants' Eligibility for Unemployment Compensation (New York, National Employment Law Project, April, 2002).
26. In the case of UI receipt, it was assumed that individuals would indicate "yes" if they received the benefit and that those who did not
27. Know whether they were recipients likely were not. In the case of reasons for failure to file, it was assumed that if a respondent did not know whether a reason had affected his or her decision to file, the reason likely did not have a large impact on the decision.
28. About 34 percent of respondents in the Hispanic sample are not U.S. citizens, a large proportion compared with the White non-Hispanic reference group, which is 1.6 percent noncitizen.
29. Table 1 displays the significance levels for the comparisons between Hispanic citizens and all White non-Hispanic respondents. The analysis also compared White non-Hispanic citizens with Hispanic citizens, and there were no appreciable differences in the results, which are available upon request.
30. But not significant in Model 5.
31. See Vroman, "Unemployment insurance recipients and nonrecipients".
32. Wandner and Stettner, "Why are many jobless workers not applying."
33. See Shaefer, "Identifying Key Barriers"; Report to the Chairman, Unemployment Insurance; and Grant-Thomas, "Why Are African Americans and Latinos Underrepresented."
34. See Report to the Chairman, Unemployment Insurance.
35. Bruce D. Meyer, Wallace K. C. Mok, and James X. Sullivan, The Under-Reporting of Transfers in Household Surveys: Its Nature and Consequences, NBER Working Paper 15181 (Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2009), www.nber.org/papers/w15181.