The proposed Back to Work Incentive Act of 2003 recommended personal reemployment accounts (PRAs) that would provide each eligible unemployment insurance (UI) claimant with a special account of up to $3,000 to finance reemployment activities. Account funds could be used to purchase intensive,...

Most states have exhausted their unemployment insurance (UI) trust fund and borrowed from the federal government at least once during the past 35 years. Under such circumstances, states are required by law to raise UI taxes to replenish their trust funds and to pay off their debts to the federal...

Comparisons among state unemployment insurance (UI) systems can be misleading. Frequently quoted indicators of benefit generosity, tax cost, and adherence to the experience-rating principle are influenced by the relative economic conditions of states. Such comparisons thereby obscure underlying...

Unemployment insurance is intended to reduce hardship by providing labor force members with partial wage replacement during periods of involuntary unemployment. However, in performing this income maintenance function, unemployment insurance may prolong spells of unemployment. Evidence from a...

The Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) system was established nationwide following the 1993 enactment of Public Law 103-152. The law requires state employment security agencies to profile new claimants for regular unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to identify those most likely...

This paper presents estimates of the impact of retraining and public service employment (PSE) on reemployment and earnings in the Republic of Hungary during the early phase of post-Socialist economic restructuring. Since assignment to programs resulted in groups with vastly dissimilar...

To ease the hardship associated with worker dislocation and to maintain social stability during the transition to markets, the governments of Hungary and Poland provide labor force members with unemployment compensation and a variety of active labor programs (ALPs). Follow-up surveys of...

Policies to regulate and support labor markets in the United States have mainly been an initiative of the federal government. Historically, states and localities were reluctant to act independently to build up worker rights and protections for fear of competitively disadvantaging resident...

A number of empirical studies have tested the spatial mismatch hypothesis by examining the commuting times of blacks and whites. This note points out that the link between spatial mismatch and commuting times may be weak when employment probabilities decline as the distance from job site to...

The Unemployment Compensation Amendments of 1993, Public Law 103-152, require each state employment security agency to implement a Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) system. WPRS systems are intended to identify unemployment insurance beneficiaries who are most likely to exhaust...