IBS Speaker Series: Chloe East

Join in person or via Zoom, email ibs-contact@colorado.edu for the password.
*Light lunch served at 11:45, please RSVP.

Title: The Safety Net and Job Loss: How Much Insurance Do Public Programs Provide?

Abstract: An extensive literature documents large and persistent declines in earnings following job loss. We comprehensively study the role of the public safety net in mitigating lost income from no fault job loss using the 1996-2013 Survey of Income and Program Participation. With an individual fixed effects model, we document which public programs provide the most insurance and how this varies by pre-job loss characteristics. Unemployment Insurance transfers the most income and transfers from other programs are negligible, even to lower-income job losers. Additionally, the neediest are less well insured compared to middle- and higher- income job losers. This has important implications for the progressivity of the safety net, and how best to support displaced workers.

Bio: I am an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver. 

I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Non-Resident Fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin. 

I study U.S. policies—including safety net and social insurance programs, as well as immigration policy—and examine how they affect outcomes of both foreign-born and U.S.-born people. My work has been cited in numerous policy contexts and by major media outlets, and has been published in top economics journals including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Labor Economics. I earned a B.S. in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Davis.