研究 The New Year’s Cliff: How the Expiration of Unemployment Benefits Will Affect Families

12月31日， 9.4 million individuals are expected to lose unemployment insurance (UI) benefits in the absence of new federal legislation. 大多数人——900万人, primarily non-traditional workers such as self-employed and gig economy workers—are currently receiving Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA). 另一个400,000 individuals are expected to lose Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC, a federal program that provides additional weeks of UI during the pandemic), and not be able to replace it with another benefits scheme.^[1]

The expiration of unemployment benefits is likely to undermine the well-being of unemployed workers. As data from the 12bet官方 研究所 demonstrate, this impact will extend to unemployed workers’ families and could be reflected in their spending patterns and debt payments alike. Three findings describe the likely effects of expiration.

1. 支出 is likely to drop sharply should families lose unemployment benefits as a result of the benefits cliff. 加农和诺埃尔(2019) observe in the pre-pandemic period that non-durable spending drops by 12 percent when jobless benefits expire. 在Covid-19, we also observe that spending among jobless workers fell by 14 percent when the $600 pandemic unemployment supplement expired at the end of July 2020 (法雷尔等人., 2020a). 完全, these results imply that families experiencing unemployment could likely cut spending—including spending on items such as groceries and medical expenses—if jobless benefits expire at the end of December.
2. Families also may fall behind on mortgage payments after losing unemployment benefits. Although unemployment usually causes increased mortgage delinquency, the pattern during the pandemic thus far has been reversed: only 5 percent of UI recipients in our sample missed mortgage payments between April and August, 与8%的人口相比 (法雷尔等人., 2020b). The most plausible explanation for this phenomenon is that generous unemployment benefits during the pandemic have enabled the unemployed to continue making mortgage payments. When families lose unemployment benefits, however, some may cease to make mortgage payments in full.
3. It goes without saying that losing unemployment benefits impacts not just jobless workers but also their dependents. 在大通银行的支票账户客户中, we observe that one in three workers who received unemployment benefits in September 2020 has dependent children^[2], 尽管这一估计可能是一个下限.^[3] 像这样, changes in unemployment insurance are likely to impact the livelihoods of millions of children, 还有他们父母的.