TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ashenfelter,Orley
AU  - Ashmore,David
AU  - Deschenes,Olivier
TI  - Do Unemployment Insurance Recipients Actively Seek Work?  Randomized Trials in Four U.S. States
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6982
PY  - 1999
Y2  - February 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6982
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6982.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Orley C. Ashenfelter
Industrial Relations Section
Firestone Library
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ  08544
Tel: 609/258-4040
Fax: 609/258-2907
E-Mail: c6789@princeton.edu

Olivier Deschenes
Department of Economics
2127 North Hall
University of California, Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106
Tel: 805/893-5617
Fax: 805/893-8830
E-Mail: olivier@econ.ucsb.edu
AB  - In the last two decades, U.S. policies have moved from the use of incentives to the use of sanctions to promote work effort in social programs.  Surprisingly, except for anecdotes, there is very little systematic evidence of the extent to which sanctions applied to the abusive use of social entitlements result in greater work effort.  In this paper we report the results of randomized trials designed to measure whether stricter enforcement and verification of work search behavior alone decreases unemployment (UI) claims and benefits.  These experiments were designed to explicitly test claims based on non-experimental data failure of claimants to actively seek work.  Our results provide no support for the view that the failure to actively seek work has been a cause of overpayment in the UI system.
ER  -