As Crisis Continues, More Unemployed Californians are Receiving UI Benefits

The Unemployment Insurance (UI) system is the primary program to support workers impacted by economic downturns. However, historically, most unemployed workers do not receive UI benefits. In response to the unique nature of the unemployment crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, federal lawmakers made several changes to the UI system in order to reach more impacted workers. This Data Point seeks to shed light on the extent to which UI benefits reached unemployed workers by leveraging administrative data on California UI claimants to construct an improved recipiency rate measuring the share of unemployed or underemployed workers in California who received benefits for regular UI over the course of the COVID-19 crisis. We present monthly estimates (through December of 2020) of this recipiency rate for each of California’s 58 counties, and complement these with county-level measures of economic recovery. We then analyze how these two measures vary for counties with different social and economic characteristics. Finally, we look back at the impact of the COVID Relief bill passed at the end of the year, and compare CPL projections of the number of claimants who would have exhausted their benefits had that bill not passed with updated data. CPL’s projections were quite close, and the relief bill signed into law on December 27th helped prevent about 1.1 million individuals from losing their UI benefits.