آیا دریافت کنندگان بیمه بیکاری به طور فعال به دنبال کارهستند؟ مدارک و شواهد از کارآزمایی های تصادفی در چهار ایالت آمریکا

In this paper, we report the results of the only field test of which we are aware that uses randomized trials to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment claims and benefits paid in the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) program. These experiments, which were implemented in four U.S. sites in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia and Tennessee, were designed to explicitly test claims based on nonexperimental data, summarized in Burgess and Kingston (An Incentives Approach to Improving the Unemployment Compensation System, W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1987), that a prime cause of overpayments is the failure of claimants to actively seek work. Our results provide no support for the view that the failure to actively search for work has been a cause of overpayment in the UI system.

In the last two decades, U.S. policies have moved from the use of incentives to the use of sanctions to promote work effort in social programs. This shift in orientation in public policies has been documented by Jencks (1992), who, like Murray (1984), argues that it has been based, in part, on the perception that these programs are riddled with abuse. Surprisingly, except for anecdotes, there is very little systematic evidence of the extent to which sanctions applied to abusive use of social entitlements result in greater work effort. In this paper, we report the results of the only field test of which we are aware that uses randomized trials to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment claims and benefits paid in the U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) program. These experiments, which we implemented in four sites in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Tennessee, were designed to explicitly test claims based on nonexperimental data, summarized in Burgess and Kingston (1987),1 that a prime cause of overpayments is the failure of claimants to actively seek work. Our results provide no support for the view that the failure to actively search for work has been a cause of overpayments in the UI system. These results provide a much-needed complement to the results of other UI system experiments reported by Meyer (1995), who first brought these unique field experiments to broad attention. The treatments in the experiments Meyer (1995) surveys, which he reports were cost effective, incorporated elements of both work search verification and a system designed to teach workers how better to search for jobs. The experiment reported here incorporated only the element of work search verification, and we find that the treatments provided no benefits. Taken together, the results of both sets of experiments imply that providing workers with subsidized job search assistance may be a relatively inexpensive way to provide cost effective, but small, benefits to both workers and society. In the remainder of the paper we first set the stage for our analysis with a brief description of previous research on UI work search rules and the details of operation of the current U.S. system. We next discuss our experimental design, the nature of the experimental treatment, and our data collection procedures. Since randomization is so important for our estimation procedure, and since there is some evidence that several field experiments have not been properly randomized, we next report tests of the effectiveness of our simple randomization technique. Finally, we report the effect of the experimental treatment on claimant qualification rates, benefit payments, and claim durations. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of our findings.

The results of the randomized trials reported in this study cast doubt on the efficacy of many assertions about abusive behavior in the U.S. unemployment insurance system. We found some evidence that, in one of the four states we studied, tighter checks on eligibility may have a small effect on initial benefit payments. However, even in this state, eligibility checks led to little or no effect on total benefit payments or the duration of unemployment claims. Most important, we found no evidence that verification of claimant search behavior led to shorter claims or lower total benefit payments. Any program evaluation would be incomplete without a discussion of the additional costs of the treatments. While the additional costs of the treatments were relatively modest on a per-person basis, they would have represented an important share of the total administrative costs of the UI system if the stricter eligibility review program had been implemented on a national scale. The policy implication of this simple comparison is that stricter enforcement of the eligibility rules of the type we tested would probably not result in large enough savings for the UI system to justify the cost. There are, of course, many potential limitations of these results. First, the experiments were conducted as a test of alterations in the rules of only four U.S. states. Our results test only whether further work search verification in those states may be worth the costs. One interpretation of our results is that the current rules implemented in the four states we analyze are optimal, and the results might be different elsewhere. Second, the experiments were conducted at a time when the aggregate unemployment rate was considerably higher than it is today, and this might also affect the results. Only further experimentation can demonstrate whether these issues raise serious problems for the generality of the results. Many social programs now incorporate sanctions on suspected abusive behavior, including the major welfare programs in the U.S. As with other government programs, the effectiveness of sanctions should be subject to a cost–benefit test. The results in this paper indicate that, at least in one program, the enforcement of sanctions does not appear to be worth the cost.