This paper concludes that the substantial COVID-19 unemployment insurance expansion had limited disincentive effects on job searches, particularly among lower-income individuals, despite high wage replacement rates.
This academic paper examines how federal privacy laws restrict data collection needed for assessing racial disparities, creating a tradeoff between protecting individual privacy and enabling algorithmic fairness in government programs.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
This paper introduces a method for auditing benefits eligibility screening tools in four steps: 1) generate test households, 2) automatically populate screening questions with household information and retrieve determinations, 3) translate eligibility guidelines into computer code to generate ground truth determinations, and 4) identify conflicting determinations to detect errors.
This resource provides examples and practical guides that explain how to use existing regulations and data sharing agreements to transfer client information or eligibility status between benefit programs.
A recent study challenges the common belief that income support programs like SNAP reduce employment, finding that for individuals with a work history, receiving SNAP benefits can actually increase long-term employment.
This resource is a research paper examining the role of the public safety net in insuring job losers against income loss, analyzing which government programs provide financial support and how benefits vary based on pre-job loss income levels.
Through a field scan, this paper identifies emerging best practices as well as methods and tools that are becoming commonplace, and enumerates common barriers to leveraging algorithmic audits as effective accountability mechanisms.
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers—predominantly African Americans—from the 1935 Social Security Act's unemployment insurance program is analyzed as a result of international policy diffusion rather than solely domestic racial politics.
