THE IMPACT OF THE POTENTIAL DURATION OF UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS ON THE DURATION OF UNEMPLOYMENT

This paper examines the impact of the potential duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on unemployment in the United States. First, we use a large sample of household heads to examine differences in the unemployment spell distributions of UI recipients and nonrecipients. Sharp increases in the escape rate from unemployment both through recalls and new job acceptances are apparent for UI recipients around the time of benefits exhaustion. Such increases are not apparent at similar points of spell duration for nonrecipients. Second, our analysis of accurate administrative data from 12 states indicates that a one week increase in potential benefit duration increases the average duration of the unemployment spells of UI recipients by 0.16 to 0.20 weeks. © 1990.