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Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) in Maryland—Formative Evaluation, Program Year 2019
Get PDFUnemployment insurance (UI) exists to provide temporary partial wage replacement during periods of involuntary unemployment while beneficiaries are actively seeking reemployment. The reemployment effort required of UI beneficiaries, which balances the work disincentive of income replacement, ensures that UI is social insurance rather than social welfare.
In 2017, Congress appropriated funding to provide reemployment services and eligibility assessments (RESEA) to UI beneficiaries. The legislation also required that states receiving RESEA conduct annual evaluations to produce causal evidence that reemployment services and eligibility assessments are effective.
In this formative evaluation, we produce the first causal effect estimates of the Maryland RESEA program for participants in program year 2019. Using a comparison-group design and administrative microdata, we find that participation in RESEA, relative to participation in Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS), reduces UI benefit year compensation by 0.62 weeks, reduces the probability of UI benefit exhaustion by 3.1 percentage points, and decreases the proportion of benefits received by 2.3 percentage points. We also find that RESEA increases the probability of employment in the quarter following the benefit year begin date by 1.9 percentage points but does not affect medium-run employment and earnings outcomes. Results suggest that Maryland’s RESEA program successfully met its stated goal of reducing UI duration by increasing employment rates in the short term, but the program does not seem to offer a longer-term solution to improving UI beneficiaries’ labor market outcomes.
Our evaluation design was driven by the available data, which include indicators of program participation but no information on referral to reemployment services programs. As in all states, Maryland assigns WPRS profiling scores, which measure the probability of UI benefit exhaustion, to all beneficiaries who are required to engage in an active search for reemployment. That is, UI beneficiaries who are neither union hiring hall members nor awaiting employer recall. Then, within each county, Maryland refers the 50 percent of UI beneficiaries determined most likely to exhaust their benefits to RESEA and the remainder to WPRS. We show, however, that distributions of profiling scores do not differ between RESEA and WPRS participants, and that observed proportions of UI benefits received are uncorrelated with profiling scores. In light of this, as a basis for this formative evaluation, we assume that assignment to RESEA or WPRS is as good as random, conditional on observable characteristics. We test the robustness of results to alternative specifications and matching models. We also estimate associations between particular UI services and UI and labor market outcomes, but selection into services received precludes causal impact estimates.
This formative evaluation sets a benchmark for Maryland RESEA program impact estimates. Together with our process analysis report, we have provided guidance for more complete and consistent recording of data on RESEA referrals, participation, and services as a basis for future ii evaluations. In future years, we expect to produce increasingly informative evidence on the RESEA program, RESEA services, and efforts to improve participation by UI beneficiaries referred to RESEA
How Federal Pandemic Relief Helped Replenish State Unemployment Reserves
Get PDFUnemployment insurance (UI) is a joint federal-state program that pays temporary partial earnings replacement to involuntarily unemployed workers while they seek reemployment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, UI claims surged and became a primary source for income replacement for workers who lost their jobs. However, despite previous federal incentives for states to shore up their UI funding reserves, the scale of claims during the pandemic was unprecedented, and the federal government needed to step in to help pay not only for direct, expanded benefits but for additional assistance to states themselves. Although this effort helped backstop the successful operation of states’ UI programs, it continued the trend of the federal government paying for an increasing share of benefits during crises, and weakening incentives for state UI systems to be independent and self-financing
Introduction and Overview [to Grease or Grit?: International Case Studies of Occupational Licensing and Its Effects on Efficiency and Quality]
Get PDFA Benefit-Cost Analysis of Tulsa Pre-K, Based on Effects on High School Graduation and College Attendance
Get PDFThis paper presents new benefit-cost estimates for the Tulsa universal pre–K program. These calculations are based on estimated effects, from two recent papers, of Tulsa pre–K on high school graduation rates and college attendance rates of students who were in kindergarten in the fall of 2006. In the current paper, educational effects from these prior papers are used to infer lifetime earnings effects. Our conservative estimates suggest that per pre–K participant, the present value of earnings effects in 2021 dollars is 9,628, for a benefit-cost ratio of 2.65. Compared to prior benefit-cost studies of Tulsa pre–K, this benefit-cost ratio is below what was predicted from Tulsa pre– K’s effects on kindergarten test scores, but above what was predicted from Tulsa pre–K’s effects on grade retention by ninth grade. This fading and recovery of predicted pre–K effects as children go through K–12 and then enter adulthood is consistent with prior research. It suggests that pre–K may have important effects on “soft skills,” such as persisting in school, and reminds us that short-term studies of pre–K provide useful information for public policy
Salary History and Employer Demand: Evidence from a Two-Sided Audit
Get PDFWe study how salary disclosures affect employer demand using a field experiment featuring hundreds of recruiters evaluating over 2,000 job applications. We randomize the presence of salary questions and the candidates’ disclosures for male and female applicants. Our findings suggest that extra dollars disclosed yield higher salary offers, willingness to pay, and perceptions of outside options by recruiters (all similarly for men and women). Recruiters make negative inferences about the quality and bargaining positions of non-disclosing candidates, though they penalize silent women less
