Experience Rating: Its Objectives, Problems and Economic Implications

Within a decade, the system of rate differentiation which has become one of the distinctive characteristics of the unemployment insurance program in the United States spread from the North Woods to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The idea so vigorously advocated by Professors John R. Commons and Harold M. Groves, and their Wisconsin colleagues, having been first put into effect under the Wisconsin Law in 1938, was finally incorporated in the Mississippi Law in 1948. Though unknown to the older European systems, experience rating thus took a firm grip upon the program in this country.