Poster #64 - Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Household Food Insecurity in the United States

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Food insecurity, a socioeconomic condition of uncertain or limited access to adequate food, affects millions of U.S. households each year. Social safety net programs are widely understood to buffer households against food insecurity. A program particularly important in shaping household food security outcomes in the wake of job loss and income disruption is Unemployment Insurance (UI), the primary public benefit for displaced workers. UI is a joint federal-state program that provides temporary and partial wage replacement to eligible workers who are involuntarily unemployed. Though federal law sets broad requirements that states must follow, each state has wide discretion in administering its own programs, resulting in substantial variation in eligibility rules and benefit amounts.

Several existing studies provide suggestive evidence that UI improves food security. Studies using state variation in UI generosity find negative associations with household food insecurity (Bartfeld & Men, 2017; Fu et al., 2023), and pandemic-era research documents protective effects of expanded UI benefits (Raifman et al., 2021). However, this literature has important limitations. Prior studies rely on narrow measures of UI generosity that capture only one dimension of a multidimensional program. In addition, most studies examine either the pre-pandemic or pandemic-era in isolation, precluding assessment of whether UI's protective effects are stable across economic conditions.

The current study investigates the role of UI generosity (referring here both to the reach of the program and the magnitude of benefits) on household food insecurity, exploiting cross-state variation over time in UI program characteristics to identify the effect. It asks three related questions. First, does a more generous state UI reduce the likelihood of household food insecurity during 2002-2024, and is this relationship robust across multiple indicators of generosity? Second, do the protective effects of UI generosity differ during recessionary periods (here, the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic) and non-recessionary periods? Third, are UI's effects concentrated among households with an unemployed member, and/or do they differ by sociodemographic characteristics such as race/ethnicity and presence of children?

The study uses data from the Current Population Survey, Food Security Supplement, 2002-2024, which provides food security status (the outcome of interest) of approximately 40,000 households each year. State-level UI generosity measures are constructed from the Department of Labor's data, and include the UI replacement rate, the maximum weekly benefit amount, the maximum benefit duration, and the recipiency rate. A two-way fixed effects (TWFE) framework is used to control for time-invariant state differences and common year shocks.

Preliminary results using a subset of UI measures suggest a higher replacement rate is associated with a lower likelihood of food insecurity, and these effects are stable across economic conditions. In ongoing work, I am incorporating a fuller set of measures. By comparing estimates across multiple measures capturing both benefit generosity and program reach, this study illuminates how different dimensions of UI generosity may differentially matter for food security. Additionally, using a 23-year window encompassing two recessions, the findings provide new insights into the protective effects of UI on food security across economic conditions.

Author

• Jungjin Koo, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author