Policies to regulate and support labor markets in the United States have mainly been an initiative of the federal government. Historically, states and localities were reluctant to act independently to build up worker rights and protections for fear of competitively disadvantaging resident...

The Unemployment Compensation Amendments of 1993, Public Law 103-152, require each state employment security agency to implement a Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) system. WPRS systems are intended to identify unemployment insurance beneficiaries who are most likely to exhaust...

Traditionally studies of unemployment insurance benefit adequacy have relied on an expenditure survey. This is expensive, yields small samples, and presumes that the analyst knows which categories of expenditure are necessary. This paper uses an existing large data set, and an agnostic approach....

To evaluate the effectiveness of self-employment assistance to the unemployed in Hungary and Poland more than 5,500 follow-up interviews were conducted in early 1997 by employees of local labor offices with persons in self-employment participant and comparison group samples. Wide ranging...

To ease the hardship associated with worker dislocation and to maintain social stability during the transition to markets, the governments of Hungary and Poland provide labor force members with unemployment compensation and a variety of active labor programs (ALPs). Follow-up surveys of...

This paper examines labor market conditions and public employment policies in the United States during what some are calling the Great Recession. We document the dramatic labor market changes that rapidly unfolded when the rate of gross domestic product growth turned negative, from the end of...

Most states have exhausted their unemployment insurance (UI) trust fund and borrowed from the federal government at least once during the past 35 years. Under such circumstances, states are required by law to raise UI taxes to replenish their trust funds and to pay off their debts to the federal...

Comparisons among state unemployment insurance (UI) systems can be misleading. Frequently quoted indicators of benefit generosity, tax cost, and adherence to the experience-rating principle are influenced by the relative economic conditions of states. Such comparisons thereby obscure underlying...

Unemployment insurance is intended to reduce hardship by providing labor force members with partial wage replacement during periods of involuntary unemployment. However, in performing this income maintenance function, unemployment insurance may prolong spells of unemployment. Evidence from a...

Unemployment compensation in the United States is provided through a federal-state system of unemployment insurance (UI). UI provides temporary partial wage replacement to active job seekers who are involuntarily out of work. For older workers, UI is an important source of income security and a...