摘要: Recent concerns about deteriorating labor market conditions were prompted in part by an uptick in filings of new claims for unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. Nearly all civilian wage and salary workers are eligible to receive weekly UI benefits if they are temporarily or permanently laid off from a job through no fault of their own. By providing temporary, partial wage replacement to workers who are involuntarily unemployed, UI benefits help sustain purchasing power during cyclical downturns, thereby functioning as an automatic stabilizer for the economy (see Cleary, Kwok, and Valletta 2009).Because employers tend to shed workers when their sales outlook deteriorates, new UI claims are quite responsive to overall economic conditions. In that respect, they serve as a timely and direct measure of layoffs and underlying changes in the strength of labor demand. Figure 1 depicts the level of new UI claims …