PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Bell, Alex
AU  - Hedin, Thomas J.
AU  - Mannino, Peter
AU  - Moghadam, Roozbeh
AU  - Schnorr, Geoffrey
AU  - von Wachter, Till
TI  - Disparities in Access to Unemployment Insurance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from U.S. and California Claims Data
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.3.04
DP  - 2023 May 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 78--109
VI  - 9
IP  - 3
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/9/3/78.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/9/3/78.full
AB  - To what extent did jobless Americans benefit from unemployment insurance (UI) during the COVID-19 pandemic? This article documents geographic disparities in access to UI during 2020. We leverage aggregated and individual-level claims data to perform an integrated analysis across four measures of access to UI. In addition to the traditional UI recipiency rate, we construct rates of application among the unemployed, rates of first payment among applicants, and exhaustion rates among paid claimants. Through correlations across California counties and across states, we show that areas with more disadvantaged residents had less access to UI during the pandemic. Although these disparities are large in magnitude, cross-state analysis suggests that policy can play a salient role in mitigating them.