RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Disparities in Access to Unemployment Insurance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from U.S. and California Claims Data
JF RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
FD Russell Sage Foundation
SP 78
OP 109
DO 10.7758/RSF.2023.9.3.04
VO 9
IS 3
A1 Alex Bell
A1 Thomas J. Hedin
A1 Peter Mannino
A1 Roozbeh Moghadam
A1 Geoffrey Schnorr
A1 Till von Wachter
YR 2023
UL http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/9/3/78.abstract
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.