Website

Geoffrey Schnorr is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Policy Lab at UCLA and a Research Data Specialist at the State of California’s Employment Development Department. He recently completed his PhD in Economics at the University of California, Davis. Geoff’s research aims to understand how design and implementation decisions in social programs can improve economic efficiency and equality. Several of his current projects focus on eligibility criteria in the US Unemployment Insurance program, which condition benefit eligibility on prior earnings and the underlying reason for a job loss. In this work, he demonstrates that these policy choices have important implications for the labor supply costs and insurance benefits of the program for large groups of low-income workers.
At CPL, Geoff is part of a team of researchers who have partnered with the Employment Development Department to analyze administrative Unemployment Insurance claims data during the COVID-19 pandemic. His work has been funded by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and the Bilinski Educational Foundation.