Disparities in Access to Unemployment Insurance During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Lessons from U.S. and California Claims Data

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.

Analysis of Unemployment Insurance Claims in California During the COVID-19 Pandemic

From the Summary: "A defining feature of the COVID-19 [coronavirus disease 2019] crisis in the labor market has been sharp and historically unprecedented increases in the number of initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims. This policy brief uses close to real-time information on daily initial UI claims in California from the state's Employment Development Department to better understand the magnitude of COVID-19's labor market impacts and how different types of workers are experiencing these impacts. This research is based on a partnership between the Labor Market Information Division of the California Employment Development Department and the California Policy Lab, a research center at the University of California, with sites at the UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] and Berkeley campuses."