Working Paper: NBER ID: w29703
Authors: Gabriel Chodorow-Reich; Peter Ganong; Jonathan Gruber
Abstract: We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state. We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession result in benefit extensions that occur in less sick labor markets than the historical average for benefit extensions; (ii) the ad hoc extensions in the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions in total cover a similar number of additional weeks as common proposals for automatic triggers, but concentrate coverage more in weaker labor markets; (iii) compared to ex post policy, the cost of common proposals for automatic triggers is close to zero.
Keywords: No keywords provided
JEL Codes: E24; E32; E62; H53; J65
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| automatic triggers (C69) | benefit extensions in less sick labor markets (J49) |
| ad hoc extensions (B50) | coverage in weaker labor markets (J68) |
| automatic triggers (C69) | costs of UI systems (J65) |