Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

When households re-locate due to one spouse receiving a long distance job offer, the `trailing' spouse -- who is typically the wife -- is typically not eligible for unemployment insurance if they leave their job voluntarily. Lack of access to income support during job search is one reason we might think trailing spouses have lower earnings post move; without unemployment insurance to cover their lost income, they may be more likely to take a low quality job than otherwise. A number of states have implemented unemployment eligibility provisions that make individuals who voluntarily quit their job for 'compelling family reasons' such as spousal relocation eligible for unemployment benefits. In this paper, I use panel data from the NLSY79 and NLSY97 to estimate the effects of such a policy on migration rates, benefit take up, and long run earnings paths for the trailing spouses. Using state historical records of unemployment law, I identified the year and month that states changed their policies to allow trailing spouses to collect unemployment insurance for all years between 1997 and 2015. I then use a difference-in-differences design, using variation in the year in which a household moved and the year in which different states put in place this eligibility guideline, to identify the impacts of this policy on take up. Preliminary results on migration decisions suggest that this policy increases cross-state migration rates for eligible couples by 3.8 percentage points whereas it had no significant effect on migration rates for single households.