Existing research documents that more generous unemployment insurance (UI) delays job finding with limited effects on job quality. This paper exploits the eligibility threshold to examine how UI receipt impacts job search for lower-income workers. Using employer-employee matched data from Washington State and a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that UI receipt minimally delays re-employment but substantially improves labor market outcomes. UI increases cumulative hours worked by approximately 15 full-time weeks and earnings by \$14,000 in the two years following job loss, representing 37 percent and 50 percent increases, respectively. These gains are driven by improved job quality, as recipients experience longer tenure and higher wages with their next employer. Effects are larger for workers living near public employment offices, suggesting that access to re-employment services enhances search productivity. Expanding UI access by lowering the eligibility threshold is much more cost-effective than raising benefit levels or extending potential duration, as workers benefit from more stable, higher-paying re-employment that partially offsets its cost.

Unemployment Insurance (UI) provides income support during job loss, yet take-up remains puzzlingly low, with only about half of eligible unemployed workers in the U.S. claiming benefits. We implement a large-scale field experiment among 50,000 recently unemployed, non-UI claiming workers in Washington State to study the causes and labor supply implications of incomplete take-up. The feature of the data that allows us to distinguish between misperception of eligibility and hassle costs is the effect of treatment on the UI rejection rate of those induced to apply. We experimentally vary whether letters include a destigmatizing message. Informational letters increased UI applications by 1.5 percentage points (80% relative to control), with effects concentrated among low-wage workers. We attribute the effect of generic informational letters on take-up to reduced hassle costs rather than improved eligibility perceptions. Destigmatizing letters induced more applications only from high-wage job seekers. Despite higher take-up, we can rule out negative effects of UI receipt on job search duration. These findings suggest that disproportionately low-wage workers were induced to apply because of reduced hassle costs but did not distort their search behavior while on UI.

Over half of the U.S. population receives health insurance through an employer, with employer premium contributions creating a flat “head tax” per worker, independent of their earnings. This paper develops and calibrates a stylized model of the labor market to explore how this uniquely American approach to financing health insurance contributes to labor market inequality. We consider a partial-equilibrium counterfactual in which employer-provided health insurance is instead financed by a statutory payroll tax on firms. We find that, under this counterfactual financing, in 2019 the college wage premium would have been 11 percent lower, non-college annual earnings would have been $1,700 (3 percent) higher, and non-college employment would have been nearly 500,000 higher. These calibrated labor market effects of switching from head-tax to payroll-tax financing are in the same ballpark as estimates of the impact of other leading drivers of labor market inequality, including changes in outsourcing, robot adoption, rising trade, unionization, and the real minimum wage. We also consider a separate partial-equilibrium counterfactual in which the current head-tax financing is maintained, but 2019 U.S. health care spending as a share of GDP is reduced to the Canadian share; here, we estimate that the 2019 college wage premium would have been 5 percent lower and non-college annual earnings would have been 5 percent higher. These findings suggest that health care costs and the financing of health insurance warrant greater attention in both public policy and research on U.S. labor market inequality.