Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle? Det är titeln på en analys från amerikanska NBER som kort sammanfattat drar slutsatsen att när kongressen i december 2013 stoppade finansieringen av det amerikanska arbetslöshetsförsäkringsprogrammet EUC så satte det fart på förra årets jobbskapande.
AMERICA’S labour market boomed in 2014. By December there were 3m more people in work than a year earlier. Unemployment was 1.1 percentage points lower. The ratio of jobseekers to openings fell from a peak of seven to one in 2009 to two to one in November 2014. What was behind this? The answer in a new study will not please Democrats.
The job market is hot largely because of a cold-hearted Republican reform, it concludes. Before the financial crisis, jobless workers in most states qualified only for 26 weeks of unemployment benefits. In June 2008 that was extended, thanks to a new federal Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) programme. By the end of 2013 the average unemployed American could expect benefits to last 53 weeks; in three states they could get 73 weeks’ worth.
The study looks at what happened after Congress refused to reauthorise EUC in December 2013. The average limit on benefits plunged to 25 weeks, cutting off roughly 1.3m Americans immediately. Republicans argued that this would push people back into work. Several economists disagreed. Michael Feroli of J.P. Morgan predicted that many jobless Americans, no longer required to seek work as a condition of receiving benefits, would drop out of the labour force entirely. Researchers at the Economic Policy Institute, a leftish think-tank, said the cuts would destroy 310,000 jobs by dampening demand.
Stingier benefits may be behind America’s blistering job growth är rubriken på The Economists artikel.
Så här sammanfattar forskarna sitt resultat:
We measure the effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment. We exploit the variation induced by the decision of Congress in December 2013 not to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Recession. Federal benefit extensions that ranged from 0 to 47 weeks across U.S. states at the beginning of December 2013 were abruptly cut to zero. To achieve identification we use the fact that this policy change was exogenous to cross-sectional differences across U.S. states and we exploit a policy discontinuity at state borders. We find that a 1% drop in benefit duration leads to a statistically significant increase of employment by 0.0161 log points. In levels, 1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut. Almost 1 million of these jobs were filled by workers from out of the labor force who would not have participated in the labor market had benefit extensions been reauthorized.