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This paper examines the incidence of state unemployment insurance taxes on wages paid to workers in various demographic groups. The empirical work matches state level measures of unemployment insurance tax and benefit variables to data aggregated from the Current Population Survey on worker earnings for the period 1992 to 2002. Econometric evidence presented in the paper supports the paper's main hypothesis that UI tax rate structure has its greatest adverse impact on less mobile workers (prime age married women and young workers) and little impact on more mobile workers (prime age men).

In the United States there are two significant payroll taxes levied across all states-the Social Security payroll tax and the payroll tax that finances unemployment insurance (UI). The former is levied uniformly across employers and workers and has a relatively high taxable wage base.1 Since the Social Security tax is uniform it is difficult to avoid. Moreover, the benefit (retirement income) that the tax finances is surely a benefit that the typical worker hopes to someday collect. Accordingly, the theory of payroll tax incidence makes a hands down case for 100% incidence of the Social Security payroll tax on workers.2 The basic structure of the unemployment insurance payroll tax, on the other hand, bears little resemblance to the social security tax. Social security taxes are administered at the federal level whereas unemployment insurance payroll taxes are administered by the states with federal supervision.3 The legal incidence of the Social Security tax is divided equally between employer and employee, whereas the unemployment insurance tax is levied solely on employers in all but three states.4 Average UI tax rates vary across the states. For example, in 1995 the average tax rate was 2.12% with a standard deviation of 1.12%. Moreover, because of experience rating, tax rates vary both over time and across firms. Finally, like Social Security, unemployment insurance taxes are levied only on a portion of worker wages (i.e., the taxable wage base), but unlike Social Security this ceiling is quite low. For example, in 1995 the median ceiling was $9000, but ranged from $7000 to $25,500. This last point is important because, due to the relatively low value of the taxable wage base, variations across states and over time in the ceiling translate to effective change in the tax rate. Given that the unemployment insurance tax is structured far differently than the Social Security payroll tax, the question that naturally arises is, do these differences have implications for the incidence of the UI tax? Empirical work on the incidence of the unemployment insurance tax is sparse. The most important published article on the topic appeared in the Journal of Public Economics by Anderson and Meyer (1997). Their primary interest was in estimating the incidence of the unemployment insurance tax at the firm and the industry level. They utilized firm-level data for the years 1978 to 1984 covering eight states (Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Washington). The work I report on below has the potential to add value to the literature on several dimensions. First, both the traditional theoretical analysis of payroll tax incidence and the empirical work of Anderson and Meyer are silent about the issue of worker heterogeneity. Given the pronounced geographic variation in the structure of the UI tax, however, it seems reasonable that mobile workers will be able to avoid the tax, while geographically tied workers would bear much of the tax. The data I employ in the empirical work allow me to address this question whereas Anderson and Meyer's firm-level data precluded any assessment on this dimension. Second, I analyze separately the impact of both tax rate and of taxable wage base on the wage structure. Though these are distinct parameters of a state's UI tax structure, Anderson and Meyer combined them into a single tax variable in their empirical analysis. Finally, since my data span all fifty states and cover the years 1992 to 2002, the analysis has the potential to provide a. comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the incidence of the unemployment insurance tax. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 outlines the conceptual and theoretical basis of the empirical work to follow. Section 3 discusses the data employed in the empirical analysis and a variety of econometric issues that must be addressed in order to properly determine the incidence of the tax. Section 4 presents the findings of the empirical analysis. Section 5 closes the paper with a summary of the main conclusions.

The principal question raised in this paper is how do wages vary with the structure of state unemployment insurance taxes? Though economists have written extensively about tax incidence in general, the incidence of unemployment insurance taxes has largely gone unstudied (with the notable exception of the work by Anderson and Meyer). I sketched a theory of how workers would respond to change in a given state's level of UI tax. This theory borrows from past work on the corporate income tax and on the property tax, both of which set the incidence analysis in a general equilibrium framework. Given the geographic variability of state unemployment insurance taxes, such an approach is warranted. The theory advanced in this paper also argues that geographic mobility should play a key role in determining the extent of shifting to wages. In order to test the mobility proposition, workers were stratified into three different demographic groups-prime age men (deemed mobile), prime age married women (deemed not mobile), and young workers (deemed not mobile). The empirical analysis of the paper initially matched state-level measures of unemployment insurance tax and benefit variables to individual worker data on earnings and a variety of other personal characteristics. A number of possible sources of heterogeneity were identified (individual, state-level, and firm-level). In order to control for or eliminate these sources of heterogeneity, the micro data were aggregated up to the state level. The empirical analysis generally supports the theory advanced in the paper. Specifically, increase in real taxable wage base translates into lower wages for both married women and for youths, while such an increase in base has a much smaller and weakly significant impact on the earnings of prime-age men. Furthermore, the pattern of the coefficients accords with the conjecture that married women are less mobile than youths. The analysis also reveals that changes in the taxable wage base are reflected in the earnings of women and youths with a lag of two years, suggesting that it takes the labor market some time to react to a change in UI tax base. Finally, it is noteworthy that the state UI tax rate is not statistically significant for any of the groups. When the component of the tax that is predictable on the basis of past unemployment is filtered out, however, the tax rate does become marginally significant for married women.