The COVID-19 pandemic has affected employment globally, especially in the private sector. This study aims to identify the effects of the pandemic on the employment statuses such as lower wages and lack of jobs in the Kurdistan Region Government ( KRG). The research questions guiding the study are the following: How has the COVID-19 crisis affected livelihoods in the KRG? How have these changes affected the association among income loss, working status, business closure, and gender? We have conducted a survey in May 2021 to examine changes in the work situation; the empirical cases cover a sample of 72 people aged between 20 and 60 years old in the Kurdistan Region in Iraq. In addition, we perform a chi-square test to check whether the relationships between losing salary and working status, and business shutdown and gender are significant or not. The findings revealed 37.5% of salary cut and about 50% of employees’ businesses shut down and 51% of working hours get shorter due to the COVID-19 crisis in the KRG. Our result shows no association between losing salary and working status, while there is an association between gender and business shutdown. Beyond this, the study seeks to highlight new and essential information about position reduction related to age class, difficulty to find a job related to the level of education, and working hours related to gender. Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13132-023-01130-1.

In multivariate survival analysis, estimating the multivariate distribution functions and then measuring the association between survival times are of great interest. Copula functions, such as Archimedean Copulas, are commonly used to estimate the unknown bivariate distributions based on known marginal functions. In this paper the feasibility of using the idea of local dependence to identify the most efficient copula model, which is used to construct a bivariate Weibull distribution for bivariate Survival times, among some Archimedean copulas is explored. Furthermore, to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed procedure, a simulation study is implemented. It is shown that this approach is useful for practical situations and applicable for real datasets. Moreover, when the proposed procedure implemented on Diabetic Retinopathy Study (DRS) data, it is found that treated eyes have greater chance for non-blindness compared to untreated eyes.