bias30334 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Why don't you cite the source? This from the
> right wing nut job rag WashingtonExaminer
No. It's a National Bureau of Economic Research paper:
The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle?
Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, Kurt Mitman
NBER Working Paper No. 20884
Issued in January 2015
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20884
The new article is just reporting on it and there are similar reports published elsewhere including on Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com site:
Title: “The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle?”
Authors: Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, Kurt Mitman
What they found: The elimination of emergency unemployment benefits at the end of 2013 played a major role in spurring the subsequent acceleration in job growth in 2014.
Why it matters: When the recession struck in 2008, Congress voted to extend unemployment benefits beyond the standard 27 weeks offered by most states. The program was gradually pared back during the recovery, and at the end of 2013, Congress allowed it to expire entirely. Many conservative economists said the program was doing more harm than good by providing the long-term jobless an incentive not to look as hard for work. Liberal economists were more skeptical, as was I; in an article last spring, I found little evidence that the end of emergency benefits was pushing the jobless back to work. But in this paper, the authors argue that conservatives were right and that the cutoff of benefits helps explain the surge in hiring in 2014. They use county-level data to show that places where the reduction in benefits was greatest also experienced the greatest job gains. They estimate that the policy change led to the creation of 1.8 million jobs in 2014, and that nearly 1 million of those jobs were filled by workers who otherwise would have stayed out of the labor market.
Key quote: “The analysis based on this simple inference implies that the cut in benefits in 2014 can explain nearly all of the observed aggregate employment growth in 2014. The abrupt reversal in the relative employment growth trend of high benefit states and border counties in December 2013, right at the time when the benefit durations were cut, strongly suggests that our analysis indeed identifies the implications of this particular policy change. There were no other policy changes at the turn of 2014 likely to have significant labor market implications. Moreover, we are not aware of any policy changes that could have differentially affected states depending on their pre-reform benefit duration.”
Data they used: Local Area Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.