New Evidence from Washington State's RESEA evaluation

• In Event: New Experimental Evidence on the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) Program

Abstract

The Washington state Employment Security Department administers the Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) program. This program is designed to help unemployment insurance (UI) claimants return to work more quickly.  Recent evidence from a randomized controlled trial shows that this program effectively met its goals in 2022 (Brigandi et al. 2024).

The same RCT provides evidence about 2023. This paper presents program effect estimates for 2023, compares and contrasts program effectiveness in WA state in 2022 and 2023, and explores three reasons why the program impact may have changed from 2022 to 2023.

The first possible explanation is that the RESEA program's effect depends on how easy it is to find a job, and ease of finding a job changed over time. Using publicly-available data on the number of job openings each month (a proxy for new job openings) and the number of initial UI claims each month (a proxy for the number of job seekers), we construct a measure of how easy it is to find a job. We interact this measure with the RESEA treatment variable in our empirical framework to estimate the correlation between the RESEA program's effectiveness, and how easy it was to find a job in the month that the job seeker began their UI claim.

The second possible explanation is that the RESEA program's effect depends on who is assigned to the program. Informed by the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) system, we observed a large increase in the number of technology sector layoffs in Washington state in 2023. Using a standard heterogeneous effects analysis, we document significantly different program effects for technology sector workers and all other WA state workers.

The third possible explanation is about job stability for those who find reemployment. We observed an increase in the likelihood that job seekers found employment that lasted only one to two calendar quarters before another separation. Increases in the incidence of one-quarter and two-quarter jobs may be linked to changes in program effectiveness over time.

Citation: Brigandi, A., Klein, M., Kondratjeva, O., Lee, D. (2024) Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessment (RESEA) Evaluation: 2022 Report. Washington State Employment Security Department. Accessed from https://esd.wa.gov/media/pdf/2285/resea-phase-1-2022-report-240827pdf/download?inline on 04/21/2025

Author

• Matthew Klein, The Employment Security Department
  Presenting Author