EVALUATING POOLED EVIDENCE FROM THE REEMPLOYMENT BONUS EXPERIMENTS

Social experiments conducted in Pennsylvania and Washington tested the effect of offering Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants a cash bonus for rapid reemployment. This paper combines data from the two experim ents and uses a consistent framework to evaluate the experiments and d etermine,vith greater certainty the extent to which a reemployment bon us can affect economic outcomes. Bonus offers in each of the experimen ts generated statistically significant but relatively modest reduction s in UI receipt. Since the estimated impacts on UI receipt were modest , the reemployment bonuses did not generate the UI savings necessary t o pay for administering and paying the bonuses. Hence, contrary to ear lier findings from a bonus experiment conducted in Illinois, findings from the Pennsylvania and Washington experiments strongly suggest that a reemployment bonus is not a cost-effective method of speeding the r eemployment of UI claimants.