We examine worker-employer disputes over unemployment insurance (UI) claims and their relationship to benefit nonpayment. Administrative UI records allow us to use workers who file multiple claims to control for unobserved worker heterogeneity. We observe strong employer effects on whether claims are disputed, and weak evidence that employers dispute Black workers’ claims more often than White workers’ claims. But disputes are only weakly related to nonpayment, and nonpayment associated with employer disputes does not differ by race or ethnicity. We speculate that the UI agency mediates employer disputes to mitigate racial differences in UI nonpayment.
Lachowska et al. (Fri,) studied this question.