Does $600 a week make people shirk? Evidence is no

Here’s the Yale finding in a nutshell:

“We find that the workers who experienced larger increases in UI generosity did not experience larger declines in employment when the benefits expansion went into effect. Additionally, we find that workers facing larger expansions in UI benefits have returned to their previous jobs over time at similar rates as others. We find no evidence that more generous benefits disincentivized work either at the onset of the expansion or as firms looked to return to business over time.”

The team of researchers from Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy drew on data from Homebase, which sells scheduling and time-clock software to small businesses, over half of them in the food and drink industry, which has relatively low pay and has had massive layoffs. That’s precisely where you might expect to see government checks discouraging employment.