Lunchtime Must-Read: Ben Casselman: Losing Benefits Isn’t Prodding Unemployed Back to Work

Ben Casselman: Losing Benefits Isn’t Prodding Unemployed Back to Work: “More than a million Americans saw their unemployment benefits expire at the start of the year, after Congress failed to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program….

Some economists had argued that the program was doing more harm than good by discouraging recipients from looking for work or taking jobs. They said that because the job market was improving, the time had come to cut off benefits. That would prod the unemployed to get back to work, perhaps leading them to accept offers that seem less than ideal. So far, however, the evidence doesn’t seem to support that theory. Rather than finding jobs, the long-term unemployed continue to be out of luck. We now have three months’ worth of job market data since the benefits program expired…”