Measuring the Labor Market at the Onset of the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Homebase (joinHomebase.com), and particularly Ray Sandza and Andrew Vogeley, for generously providing data. We also thank David Gilbertson for tabulations of Kronos data. Caroline Buckee and Victor Chernozhukov provided extremely valuable comments as discussants. We thank Lucas Finamor for pointing out a coding error in an early version of these analyses. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The Economic Impacts of COVID-19: Evidence from a New Public Database Built Using Private Sector Data

“…Consistent with the results of Bartik et al (2020), we find that wage rates have remained unchanged through the COVID shock for workers who retained their jobs. Additionally, changes in employment rates are virtually identical to changes in hours because the extensive margin accounts for the vast majority of hours reductions.…”

“…Spending and employment remained well below baseline levels even after reopenings, and in particular did not rise more rapidly in states that reopened earlier relative to comparable states that reopened later. Spending and employment also fell well before state-level shutdowns were implemented, consistent with other recent work examining data on hours of work and movement patterns (Bartik et al 2020, Villas-Boas et al 2020.…”

“…what we assemble here to analyze consumer spending (e.g., Baker et al 2020, Chen, Qian, and Wen 2020, Cox et al 2020, business revenues (e.g., Alexander and Karger 2020), labor market trends (e.g., Bartik et al 2020, Cajner et al 2020, Kurmann, Lalé, and Ta 2020 Wiczer 2020), and social distancing (e.g., Allcott et al 2020, Chiou andTucker 2020, Goldfarb and Tucker 2020, Mongey, Pilossoph, and Weinberg 2020). These papers have identified a number of important results consistent with our findings, such as concentrated impacts on spending in certain industries such as food and accommodation; social distancing that is a result of voluntary choices rather than legislation; and large employment losses for low-income workers.…”

The effect of COVID-19 on the economy: evidence from an early adopter of localized lockdowns

“…The relatively large effect of lockdowns has not yet been found empirically in the United States. For instance, Bartik et al [30] found that the relative impact of lockdowns was smaller, explaining 1/6 of the total fall during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results show that lockdowns explain half of the effect, both in the raw time series ( Figure 3) and in the main regressions (Table 2).…”

“…Researchers in the United States have examined how non-pharmaceutical interventions have impacted unemployment insurance, employment, or store client traffic. Some research suggests that lockdowns explain a small share of the total economic activity decline [22,[30][31][32]. Others [24,33,34] have found that lockdowns play a relevant role in explaining the drop in economic activity.…”