The UI program was established in 1935 and serves two primary objectives: (1) to temporarily replace a portion of earnings for workers who become unemployed through no fault of their own and (2) to help stabilize the economy during recessions by providing an infusion of consumer dollars into the economy. UI is made up of 53 state-administered programs that are subject to broad federal guidelines and oversight. In fiscal year 2004, these programs covered about 129 million wage and salary workers and paid benefits totaling $41.3 billion to about 8.8 million workers. Federal law provides minimum guidelines for state programs and authorizes grants to states for program administration. States design their own programs, within the guidelines of federal law, and determine key elements of these programs, including who is eligible to receive state UI benefits, how much they receive, and the amount of taxes that employers must pay to help provide these benefits. State unemployment tax revenues are held in trust by the Department of Labor (Labor) and are used by the states to pay for regular weekly UI benefits, which typically can be received for up to 26 weeks. During periods of high unemployment, the Extended Benefits program, funded jointly by states through their UI trust funds and by the federal government through the Unemployment Trust Fund, provides up to 13 additional weeks of benefits for those who qualify under state program rules. Additional benefits, funded by the federal government, may be available to eligible workers affected by a declared major disaster or during other times authorized by Congress. To receive UI benefits, an unemployed worker must file a claim and satisfy the eligibility requirements of the state in which the worker’s wages were paid. Although states’ UI eligibility requirements vary, generally they can be classified as monetary and nonmonetary. Monetary eligibility requirements include having a minimum amount of wages and employment over a defined base period, typically, about a year before becoming unemployed, and not having already exhausted the maximum amount of benefits or benefit weeks to which they would be entitled because of other recent unemployment. In addition to meeting states’ monetary eligibility requirements, workers must satisfy their states’ nonmonetary eligibility requirements. Nonmonetary eligibility requirements include being able to work, being available for work, and becoming unemployed for reasons other than quitting a job or being fired for work-related misconduct. In all states, claimants who are determined to be ineligible for benefits are entitled to an explanation for the denial of benefits and an opportunity to appeal the determination. Since UI was introduced, researchers and those responsible for overseeing the program have monitored the size, cost, and structure of the program and its effects on individuals’ movement into and out of the workforce, including which types of workers receive UI benefits. Much of what is known about the dynamics of the UI program has been based on snapshots of the UI beneficiary population at any given time. Labor regularly gathers UI program data from the states, including each state’s eligibility requirements, employers’ UI tax rates, program revenues and costs, and numbers of claims received and approved. An extensive amount of research has been devoted to the effect of UI benefit receipt on unemployment duration. Specifically, researchers have found that receiving UI benefits increases unemployment duration. Much of this research is focused on measuring how changes in the amount of UI benefits increase the amount of time that an unemployed worker takes to find a new job. Although much is known about UI caseloads and about the relationship between UI benefits and unemployment duration, less is known about the patterns of UI receipt among individual workers over their entire working careers. What is known about the patterns of UI benefit receipt over an extended period for individual workers comes from a few studies that are fairly limited in scope. In one study, researchers analyzed 1980-1982 survey data and found that among unemployed workers who were eligible for UI, younger or female workers were less likely to receive UI benefits, while union workers, workers from large families, or those with more hours of work from their previous jobs were more likely to receive UI. In another study, using UI administrative data from five states, researchers found that between 36 and 44 percent of UI claims from 1979 to 1984 were from workers who had received UI benefits more than once and that middle- aged workers and workers with higher earnings were more likely to be repeat UI recipients. Another study, based on survey data from the NLSY79, found that 16 percent of young adults had received UI benefits more than once between 1978 and 1991 and that as many as 46 percent of those who received UI were repeat recipients. This study also found that workers who were women or Hispanic or whose fathers had more years of education were less likely to become repeat recipients than workers who were men or non-Hispanic or whose fathers had fewer years of education. In 2005, we analyzed the NLSY79 to determine the extent to which individual workers received UI benefits during their early working lives. We found that 38 percent of workers born between 1957 and 1964 received UI at least once between 1979 and 2002, with almost half of these individuals receiving UI benefits more than once. (See fig. 1.) We also found that the rate at which unemployed workers received UI benefits varied across industries, but we did not control for any of the other factors that may have helped to explain this variation. Earnings, age, education, and most notably past UI benefit receipt are all associated with the likelihood of receiving UI benefits for UI-eligible workers. Education, earnings, and union membership, and current UI benefit receipt, are associated with unemployment duration. Unemployed workers are more likely to receive UI benefits if they have higher earnings prior to becoming unemployed, are younger or have more years of education, or have a history of past UI benefit receipt, when compared to workers with similar characteristics. We found that past experience with the UI program has a particularly strong effect on the future likelihood of receiving UI benefits. In addition, UI-eligible workers are more likely to receive UI when the local unemployment rate is high. However, some characteristics, such as the weekly UI benefit amount that a worker is eligible to receive, are not associated with a greater likelihood of receiving UI benefits. Unemployed workers who have higher earnings or are younger or who are more educated are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar workers. With respect to earnings, our simulations show that the likelihood of receiving UI tends to increase as the amount earned in the year prior to becoming unemployed increases (see fig. 2). For example, a UI-eligible worker with earnings between $10,000 and $11,999 in the year before becoming unemployed has a 36 percent likelihood of receiving UI, whereas a worker who earned roughly twice as much (between $20,000 and $24,999) has a 45 percent likelihood of receiving UI. The likelihood of receiving UI is lowest among workers with the lowest earnings (i.e., less than $10,000 in the year before becoming unemployed). There is generally little difference in the likelihood of receiving UI among workers earning $18,000 or more. This result confirms our 2000 finding that low-wage workers are less likely to receive UI benefits than workers with higher earnings even when they have worked for the same amount of time. Our current result also controls for other worker differences, such as which industries the workers were employed in or whether they were ineligible for benefits, which we had not previously been able to rule out as explanations for the variation in likelihood of receiving UI. The relationship between higher earnings and a higher likelihood of receiving UI benefits is also consistent with economic theory that predicts that workers with higher earnings prior to becoming unemployed will be more reluctant to accept lower reemployment wages and are therefore more likely to take advantage of UI benefits as a way to subsidize their job search efforts. Concerning age, our simulations show that the likelihood of receiving UI peaks at about age 25 and decreases thereafter (see fig. 3). More specifically, a 25-year-old unemployed worker who is eligible for UI is more than twice as likely to receive UI as an otherwise similar 40-year-old unemployed worker. Previous studies have found that younger workers are less likely to receive UI benefits than older workers. However, these previous studies did not include as much information about workers’ past unemployment and UI benefit receipt histories as our current analysis. Therefore, because older workers have more of this experience than younger workers, it is possible that our analysis has controlled for the effect of this past experience more completely than these previous studies, resulting in a more precise estimate of the effect of age. We are unable to explain why younger workers are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar older workers. However, it is possible that older workers, who have had more time to accumulate financial assets, may have more private resources available to help them cope with unemployment than younger workers. Alternatively, younger workers may be less optimistic about how long it will take for them to become reemployed. Unemployed workers with more years of education are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar workers with fewer years of education. Specifically, our simulations show that the likelihood of receiving UI increases for each additional year of schooling that a UI- eligible worker has completed before becoming unemployed (see fig. 4). For example, a UI-eligible worker with a college education (one who has completed 16 years of schooling) when he or she becomes unemployed is almost one-fifth more likely to receive UI than a UI-eligible worker with a high school education (12 years of schooling). Although the impact of education on the likelihood of receiving UI benefits has been analyzed in other research, this research found no significant education effect. However, to the extent that workers with more years of education are better able to access and understand UI program rules, they may also be more likely to know when they are entitled to benefits and to have the information that they need to file successful benefit claims. Other factors, including gender, marital status, job tenure, and the local unemployment rate are also associated with UI benefit receipt.