Do Unemployment Insurance Recipients Actively Seek Work? Evidence from Randomized Trials in Four U.S. States

By Orley Ashenfelter, D. Ashmore, O. Deschenes. Social Science Research Network, 2005

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 we implemented in four sites in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Tennessee, were designed to explicitly test claims based on nonexperimental data, summarized in Burgess and Kingston (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 overpayments in the UI system.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Gender Studies, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9f44aea1058075f0dd533456bc9b731c52b5e140

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Bruno Crépon
2. Gerard J. van den Berg
3. Alan Manning
4. Marc Gurgand
5. Luc Behaghel
6. M. Alan
7. Jochen Kluve
8. Bernd Fitzenberger

In Gender Studies

1. Alan Manning
2. Gerard J. van den Berg
3. Bruno Crépon
4. Luc Behaghel
5. M. Alan
6. J. V. van Ommeren
7. Mogens Fosgerau

In General Health Professions

1. Gerard J. van den Berg
2. Bruno Crépon
3. Alan Manning
4. Marc Gurgand
5. Luc Behaghel
6. Jochen Kluve
7. David H. Autor
8. F. Mazzolari

Citations in the corpus

• Counseling the Unemployed: Does it Lower Unemployment Duration and Recurrence? (2005, unknown): “As a matter of fact, using a set of randomized trials that incorporated only the element of work search verification, Ashenfelter et al. (2005) argue that such treatments alone are not effective.”
• Job Search and Hyperbolic Discounting: Structural Estimation and Policy Evaluation (2008, background): “These effects are somewhat higher 31 The magnitude of the effect is somewhat larger than that found in the literature (Ashenfelter et al., 2005; van den Berg et al., 2004; Abbring et al., 2005) but this can be explained by the fact that I am assuming that the government is capable of monitoring…”
• You can't always get what you want: The impact of the UK Jobseeker's Allowance (2009, methodology): “Meyer (1995) provides a very useful review of the early studies and more recent ones can be found in Klepinger et al (1997), Ashenfelter et al (1998), Black et al (2003).”
• Unemployed and their caseworkers: should they be friends or foes? (2010, unknown): “…(Black et al., 2003; Graversen and van Ours, 2006; Lalive et al., 2006; Lalive and Zehnder, 2007), no or positive effects were found for monitoring (Ashenfelter et al., 2000; Bloom et al., 2003; Meyer, 1995; Gorter and Kalb, 1996; Dolton and O’Neill, 1996), mixed effects were found for active…”
• Counseling and Monitoring of Unemployed Workers: Theory and Evidence from a Controlled Social Experiment (2001, unknown): “Like in Ashenfelter et al. (2005), Hotz et al. (2005), and other studies, this demonstrates that the return of a social experiment is not necessarily restricted to a single estimate of the average treatment effect (notwithstanding the general difficulties with comparisons between experiments…”
• Social Experiments in the Labor Market (2016, unknown): “Ashenfelter, Ashmore, and Deschenes (2005) discuss experiments in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Virginia.23 As summarized by Meyer (1995), a core finding of these studies is that JSA reduces unemployment insurance (UI) receipt, at least in the short run.”
• Private and Public Provision of Counseling to Job-Seekers: Evidence from a Large Controlled Experiment (2014, background): “Meyer (1995) and Ashenfelter et al. (2005) report results for the US. By contrast, analyzing a Dutch randomized expermiment, van den Berg and van der Klauw (2006) find no evidence that counseling and monitoring affected the exit rate to work. More recently, Rosholm (2008), Bernard and Wolf (2008) an”
• Active Labor Market Policies (2016, background): “Ashenfelter et al. (2005) present the results of a unique experiment that casts light on the above question, in which only monitoring of the search effort is reinforced.”