Following decades of increasing child access to public health insurance, pre-pandemic enrollments fell in many states after 2016 and the number of uninsured children increased. This study provides the first national, quantitative assessment of the role of administrative burdens in driving this drop in child health insurance coverage. In addition, we identify the demographic groups of children who were most affected. We show that regulations that increased administrative burdens placed on families reduced public health insurance coverage by a mean of 5.9% within six months following the implementation of these changes. Declines were largest for Hispanic children, children with non-citizen parents, and children whose parents reported that they did not speak English well. These reductions were separate from and in addition to enrollment declines among Hispanic children following the announcement of a new public charge rule in Sept. 2018.

This note uses the asynchronous cessation of emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) in 2021 to investigate the jobs impact of ending unemployment benefits. While some states stopped providing EUB in September, other states stopped in June and July. Using the cessation month as an instrument, we estimate the causal effect on employment of reducing unemployment rolls. In the first three months following a state’s program termination, for every 100 person reduction in beneficiaries, state employment causally increased by about 35 persons. The effect is statistically different from zero and robust to a wide array of alternative specifications.

In mid-2021, 26 states halted participation in all or some federal emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) programs before those programs’ federal funding lapsed. This article uses this asynchronous EUB cessation between early- and late-halting states to estimate the causal impact of benefit cessation on employment. We find that cessation increased employment by 29 persons for every 100 (pre-halt) EUB recipients. Expressed as a number of jobs, if all states had halted EUB in June, September employment would have been 3.4 million persons higher relative to a no-halt counterfactual. Late-halting states could have signifi- cantly accelerated their states’ jobs recoveries in the second half of 2021 through early program cessation.