Major Effect Of Extending Unemployment Benefits Is Providing Income To Job Losers Who Would Have Exited The Labor Force Otherwise: Expiration Of Extended Benefits Lowers Labor Force Participation Rate: No Effect On Job Finding: Atlanta Fed

From Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Macroblog, "Is the Labor Force Participation Rate about to Fall Again?" by Dave Altig:

What will those 1.3 million Americans do when their benefits run dry? According to a recent study by Princeton University’s Henry Farber and the San Francisco Fed’s Robert Valletta—also presented at a conference hosted here at the Atlanta Fed in October—on balance, the affected individuals are likely to leave the labor force:

We examined the impact of the unprecedented extensions of UI [unemployment insurance] benefits in the United States over the past few years on unemployment dynamics and duration and compared their effects with the extension of UI benefits in the milder recession of the early 2000s. We found small but statistically significant reductions in unemployment exits and small increases in unemployment durations arising from both sets of UI extensions. The magnitude of these overall effects is similar across the two episodes...

We find that the effect on exit from unemployment occurs primarily through a reduction in labor force exits rather than through exit to employment (job finding). This is important because it implies that extended benefits do not delay the time to re-employment substantially and so do not have first-order efficiency effects. The major effect of extended benefits is redistributive, providing income to job losers who would have exited the labor force otherwise (consistent with Card et al. 2007). [Emphasis added.]

In other words, if a significant decline in unemployment benefits comes to pass, we may well see another bump downward in the labor force participation rate. Although a decline in LFP associated with the expiration of extended UI benefits would fall in Dunne and Terry’s nondemographic category, the Farber and Valletta results suggest that we should interpret any such decline as structural. And structural in this case means not directly amenable to correction by policies aimed at stimulating spending.