The North Carolina unemployment insurance experiment may be looking up

The benefits have been stopped, and there has been much recent debate over how well this is working to stimulate reemployment.  This new study is from Kurt Mitman, who is a doctoral candidate at U. Penn and an NBER research associate, here is his summary:

1. Evidence from the establishment survey confirms a substantial increase in employment in North Carolina following the unemployment insurance reform.

2. The increase in payroll employment reported by the sample of North Carolina employers is smaller than the increase in employment reported by workers in the household survey.

3. The increase in employment [is] driven by the private service sector.

4. A comparison of the growth in employment between North Carolina and the adjacent states in Figure 5 reveals a similar growth in the post-reform period between the two Carolinas, which is much faster growth than in Virginia.

5. Results in Table 3 reveal a mild tendency toward higher weekly hours post reform and little change in wages and earnings.

The full piece is here (pdf).  This seems to me our best understanding of the admittedly limited data to date.

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