The UI program was established by Title III of the Social Security Act in 1935 and is a key component in ensuring the financial security of America’s workforce. The program 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 Labor and are used by the states to pay for regular weekly UI benefits, which typically can be received for up to 26 weeks. 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. Generally, states require that workers must have a minimum amount of wages and employment over a defined base period, typically, about a year before becoming unemployed, and have not already exhausted the maximum amount of benefits or benefit weeks to which they would be entitled because of other recent unemployment. In addition workers must have become unemployed for reasons other than quitting a job or being fired for work-related misconduct, and be able and available to work. In order to demonstrate that they are able to work and available for work and are still unemployed, claimants must submit a certification of continuing eligibility—by mail, telephone, or Internet, depending on the state— throughout the benefit period. This practice is usually done weekly or biweekly. States may continue to monitor claimant eligibility through an eligibility review program, in which certain claimants are periodically contacted to review their eligibility for benefits, work search activities, and reemployment needs. Since UI was established, there have been two major changes in the nation’s workforce development system that have directly affected states’ UI programs. Specifically, in November 1993, Congress enacted legislation amending the Social Security Act to require that each state establish a Worker Profiling and Reemployment Services (WPRS) system and implement a process typically referred to as claimant profiling. The claimant profiling process uses a statistical model or characteristics screen to identify claimants who are likely to exhaust their UI benefits before finding work. Claimants identified through this process are then referred to reemployment services while they are still early in their claim. For profiled claimants, participation in designated reemployment services becomes an additional requirement for continuing eligibility for UI benefits. The second major change was the enactment of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, which requires states and localities to bring together about 17 federally funded employment and training services into a single system—the one-stop system. State UI programs are mandatory partners in the one-stop system. Another mandatory partner is the federal Employment Service, established by the Wagner-Peyser Act in 1933 to link job seekers with job opportunities. The Employment Service has historically been colocated with state UI offices to facilitate UI claimants’ access to federally funded labor exchanges, job search assistance, job referral, placement assistance, assessment, counseling, and testing. On the basis of our analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79), covering the 23- year period from 1979 through 2002, we found that 85 percent of a nationally representative sample of late baby boom workers—workers born between 1957 and 1964—had experienced unemployment at least once between 1979 and 2002. Workers who experienced unemployment were unemployed an average of five times over this 23-year period. Moreover, we found that of the 76 percent who were eligible for UI benefits at least once, 38 percent had ever received UI. (See fig. 1.) Of those who received UI benefits, 44 percent received them more than once; this represents about 17 percent of all of the workers in this age group. When all other worker characteristics have been controlled for, unemployed workers who are eligible for UI benefits are more likely to receive UI if they had higher earnings before they became unemployed, are younger, have completed more years of education, or if they have a history of past UI benefit receipt. In addition, we found that unemployed workers tend to have longer periods of unemployment if they receive UI benefits, have completed fewer years of education, had lower earnings before they became unemployed, or if they do not belong to unions. We also found that UI-eligible workers from certain industries are more likely than other workers to receive UI benefits, and that the strength of the relationship between previous UI benefit receipt and current UI receipt also varies by industry. We found that UI-eligible workers with certain characteristics are more likely to receive UI than otherwise similar UI-eligible workers. In particular, the likelihood of receiving UI tends to increase as the amount earned in the year before a worker became unemployed increases. (See fig. 2.) For example, a UI-eligible worker with earnings ranging from $10,000 to just under $12,000 in the year before becoming unemployed has a 36 percent likelihood of receiving UI, whereas a worker who earned roughly twice as much has a 45 percent 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. We also found that the likelihood of receiving UI benefits among UI- eligible workers tends to be higher for younger workers, and lower for older workers. Specifically, simulations based on our analysis results show that the likelihood of receiving UI peaks at about age 25 and decreases thereafter. In fact, 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. This finding is contrary to previous studies that reported 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 analysis. Therefore, because older workers have more previous unemployment and UI benefit receipt experience than younger workers, it is possible that our analysis controlled for the effect of these experiences more completely than previous studies, resulting in a more precise estimate of the effect of age. Although we are unable to explain why younger workers are more likely to receive UI benefits, 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. Or it may simply be the case that younger workers are less optimistic than older workers about how long it will take for them to become reemployed. Another characteristic associated with a greater likelihood of receiving UI benefits is education. We found that UI-eligible workers who have completed more years of education are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar workers with fewer years of education. For example, a UI-eligible worker with the equivalent of a college education (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 effect of education on the likelihood of receiving UI benefits has been analyzed in other research, no significant education effect was found. Still, our result seems logical. That is, to the extent that workers with more education are also better able to obtain UI program information and to understand their states’ requirements for filing claims and remaining eligible for benefits, they are also more likely to have successful benefit claims. Other factors, including a worker’s gender, marital status, job tenure, and the local unemployment rate, are also associated with UI benefit receipt. Controlling for all other characteristics among UI-eligible workers, we found that a woman is 29 percent more likely to receive UI benefits than a man, a married worker is 13 percent more likely to receive UI than an a longer-tenured worker is more likely to receive UI—for example, a worker with 4 years of tenure at his or her most recent job is 12 percent more likely to receive UI than a worker with 1 year of job tenure, and being in an area with high unemployment raises the likelihood that an unemployed worker will receive UI—for example, a worker living in an area with an unemployment rate of 9 percent is 10 percent more likely to receive UI than a worker living in an area with an unemployment rate of 5 percent. Our finding that women are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar men differs from the results of previous research, which generally found no statistically significant differences in the likelihood of receiving UI benefits for men and women. However, our analysis controls for more worker characteristics than these previous studies, and it is likely that we have more carefully isolated the effect of gender from that of other characteristics that are related to gender, such as workers’ occupations and industries. Still, it is not immediately clear why women are more likely to receive UI benefits than men who are similar with respect to other observed characteristics. We are also unable to explain why married workers are more likely to receive UI benefits than otherwise similar unmarried workers. Our finding that workers with longer job tenure are more likely to receive UI benefits is consistent with previous research. This result seems logical if we consider that workers with longer job tenures are more likely to have acquired more employer-specific skills than workers with shorter job tenures.