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5.1 Profile

This section presents some of the stylized facts about program participants and non-participants in the 31 Small Weeks regions. Table 1 shows the means (averages) of selected variables for program participants and non-participants who filed Employment Insurance (EI) benefit claims in November 1998 to August 2000.¹³ More female claimants participated in the Project than male claimants (142,526 versus 93,637, or in relative terms 17.8 percent versus 9.0 percent). Compared with non-participants, program participants experienced slightly higher rates of unemployment, and worked fewer hours in the qualifying period than non-participants. Program participants had on average spent a greater number of weeks on EI benefits since July 1, 1996 than non-participants. By gender, female participants and non-participants were roughly of the same age, but male participants were about three years younger than their non-participant counterparts. The last row of Table 1 shows the difference between a typical participant's actual EI benefit rate and what the individual would have received in the absence of the Project.

5.2 Program participation

The current Small Weeks Pilot Project of 1998-2001, became effective on November 15, 1998. Between this date and August 31, 2000, there were almost 1.84 million EI claims filed in the 31 Small Weeks regions. Out of the total number of claims, about 13.0 percent (or 236,000) of them involved small weeks of work,¹⁴ which was 2 percentage points higher than the rate for the 1997-1998 Small Weeks Adjustment Projects.

In the period, there were 142,526 small weeks claims filed by women, exceeding the number filed by men by almost 50,000. Women were almost twice as likely to participate in the Project than men, 17.8 versus 9.0 percent. For women, the current participation was 3.2 percent higher than the participation rate of the 1997-1998 Projects. For men, the corresponding figure was 1.4 percent higher.

Table 2 shows that Employment Insurance (EI) claimants from the Atlantic provinces were more likely to participate in the Project followed by Quebec. Claimants from the Prairies, Ontario, and British Columbia were less likely to be Project participants. This pattern for participants is quite different from the distribution of EI claims by region (see Table 2).¹⁵

Figure 1 shows the participation rates¹⁶ of men, women, and all claimants separately from November 1998 to August 2000. All three curves exhibit a fair amount of variation over time. However, there is no clear evidence of seasonal effects. Female participation rate increased slightly more in the fall of 1999, but the series is not long enough to show it as a recurrent increase in the fall of every year. The participation rates also reveal no trends,¹⁷ which could be interpreted as an absence of “learning effects”. That is, for the current Project, familiarity with the Small Weeks Project is not an issue, and therefore it had no effect on the participation rates over time. This lack of “learning effects” is consistent with our a priori expectation. While claimants might have been unfamiliar with the Small Weeks option in 1997, they were more aware of the Small Weeks Pilot Project by November 1998.

The female participation rate was higher than the male participation rate throughout November 1998-August 2000. The observed participation rates for both male and female claimants were generally higher in the current Small Weeks Project than their counterparts in the 1997-1998. These higher rates might have come from three possible sources: (i) claimants' familiarity with EI's Small Weeks option, (ii) factors such as differences in personal characteristics of claimants and economic climates might be partly responsible, and (iii) the current Project has been more effective in encouraging workers to accept small weeks of work than its earlier counterparts.

Footnotes

13	Strictly speaking, the term “claim” differs from “claimant”, since the same individual might file more than one claim in the period November 1998-August 2000. In the statistical work, the unit of analysis is “claim”. However, for descriptive convenience, we use the terms “claim” and “claimant” interchangeably in the report. If a claimant had a claim with small weeks of work, then such a person would be identified as a program participant.
14	For descriptive convenience, these will be called small weeks claims in the remainder of this paper. For an individual to be qualified for a claim involving small weeks of work, he or she must have had at least one regular week of work (i.e., weekly earnings of $150 and over) in the rate calculation period.
15	The claim figures refer to the claims in the size="2">small weeks regions in these provinces only.
16	For descriptive convenience, the ratio of “claims with Small weeks/total claims” is defined as the participation rate of the Small Weeks Pilot Project in the remainder of this paper.
17	These results have been confirmed by our multiple regression analysis. With the participation rate as the dependent variables, the constant term, three seasonal dummies, and the time trend as the independent variables, the estimated participation equation for male claimants show that the three seasonal dummies and the time trend are all statistically insignificant. The equation for female claimants is similar with one exception, which shows the participation rate in the third quarter is marginally significant (at the 10 percent level), while the other two seasonal dummies and the time trend remain statistically not different from zero.