Left Out of the Boom Economy: UI Recipients in the Late 1990s

Despite the unusually strong labor market of the late 1990s, the labor market outcomes for UI recipients—particularly exhaustees—are surprisingly poor. Notes that recipients in 1998, when compared with their counterparts a decade earlier, were less likely to have a job two years after their initial job separation. Those who found jobs also took longer to become reemployed. More than a quarter of exhaustees never became reemployed; 30 percent of those who did find jobs had earnings at least 25 percent lower than in their previous job.