IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/fip/fedfel/y2011ifeb7n2011-04.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Do initial claims overstate layoffs?

Author

Abstract

Initial claims for unemployment insurance averaged a stubbornly high 468,000 in the year ending December 2010, but have recently come down quickly. Many analysts interpret this as a sign that layoffs were too high to support a strong labor market recovery during most of 2010. However, claims data may have exaggerated layoffs in 2010 because the fraction of unemployed workers applying for benefits was higher than before the recession. If the proportion of eligible workers who applied were held constant, 2010 claims would have averaged roughly 20% less than the actual reading.

Suggested Citation

  • Bart Hobijn & Ayşegül Şahin, 2011. "Do initial claims overstate layoffs?," FRBSF Economic Letter, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, issue feb7.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedfel:y:2011:i:feb7:n:2011-04
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/el2011-04.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2011/02/claims-layoffs-overstated/
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ruben Hernandez-Murillo & Pawel Krolikowski, 2020. "Assessing Layoffs in Four Midwestern States during the Pandemic Recession," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, vol. 2020(21), pages 1-6, August.
    2. Ayşegül Şahin & Murat Tasci, 2020. "The Unemployment Cost of COVID-19: How High and How Long?," Economic Commentary, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, vol. 2020(09), May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:fip:fedfel:y:2011:i:feb7:n:2011-04. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Research Library (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbsfus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.