Panel:
Unemployment, Unemployment Insurance, and Reemployment Policies
(Employment and Training Programs)
Friday, November 3, 2017: 8:30 AM-10:00 AM
Wrigley (Hyatt Regency Chicago)
*Names in bold indicate Presenter
Panel Organizers: Stephen Woodbury, Michigan State University
Panel Chairs: Wayne Vroman, Urban Institute
Discussants: Karen Needels, Mathematica Policy Research and Vasilios D. Kosteas, Cleveland State University
The Great Recession exposed serious weaknesses in the U.S. system of unemployment insurance (UI), and the slow recovery has revealed deficiencies in U.S. reemployment programs. The papers in this proposed session examine several aspects of UI, job search, and employment services. Houseman, Bennici, O'Leary, and Abraham investigate why short-time compensation, which appears to have been so effective in forestalling serious unemployment in Germany during the last recession, is so little-used in the U.S. The paper by Woodbury and Kline examines how the financing of UI could be reformed so fewer state UI trust funds would become insolvent in a future recession. Desmond Toohey's paper addresses the link between employment services and occupation switching, and seeks to understand their roles in reducing unemployment durations and improving reemployment outcomes. Finally, Klee and Warren develop data in which both job search intensity and the wage after reemployment can be observed, with the goal of understanding how different methods of job search influence reemployment outcomes. Three of the four papers highlight the importance of improved data in addressing labor market policy issues, developing and merging administrative and survey data from several sources to address questions that could not be addressed convincingly with less specialized data.
