Searching, Recalls, and Tightness: An Interim Report on the COVID Labor Market

Forsythe, Eliza; Kahn, Lisa B.; Lange, Fabian; Wiczer, David

doi:10.3386/w28083

Cited by 34 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The result that by November 2020 the impact on more educated and less educated workers was similar is consistent with Forsythe et al (2021), which shows that labor market tightness has converged for college-educated and high-school workers.…”

Section: Estimation Resultssupporting

confidence: 76%

Hit Harder, Recover Slower? Unequal Employment Effects of the Covid-19 Shock

Lee¹,

Park²,

Shin³

2021

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The destructive economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic was distributed unequally across the population. Gender, race and ethnicity, age, education level, and a worker's industry and occupation all mattered. We analyze the initial negative effect and the lingering effect through the recovery phase across demographic and socio-economic groups. The initial negative impact on employment was larger for women, minorities, the less educated, and the young, even after accounting for the industries and occupations they worked in. By November 2020, however, the differential impact between men and women, and between education and age groups has vanished. Across race and ethnic groups, Hispanics and Asians were the worse hit but made up for most of the lost ground, while the initial impact on Blacks was smaller but recovery slower.

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Section: Estimation Resultssupporting

confidence: 76%

Hit Harder, Recover Slower? Unequal Employment Effects of the Covid-19 Shock

Lee¹,

Park²,

Shin³

2021

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“…the earlier version of this article, has the results through November 2020.8 TableA1in the appendix, for April 2020, shows that by industry, the leisure and hospitality industry and the other services industry were hit the hardest, while the service, construction, and production occupations suffered more than other occupations.9 This is consistent with evidence from other countries. SeeAum et al (2020a), for example.10 The results show that by February 2021 the impact on more-educated and less-educated workers was consistent with that inForsythe et al (2021), which shows that labor market tightness converged for college-educated and high-school workers.11 Among industries, as of February 2021, the leisure and hospitality industry had not recovered from the shock. There is not much of a pattern across occupations, except that service occupations still showed a significantly higher unemployment rate from their February 2020 level.12 These estimates are different from the November 2020 estimates.…”

mentioning

confidence: 88%

Hit Harder, Recover Slower? Unequal Employment Effects of the COVID-19 Shock

Lee¹,

park²,

Shin³

2021

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s late as February 2020, the U.S. labor market was booming. The unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent, a record low since December 1969. COVID-19 struck out of the blue with unprecedented speed and ferocity. U.S. unemployment spiked to 14.7 percent in April 2020, although by October 2020 it had fallen to below 7 percent and has remained below that level to date. Although COVID-19's impact on the labor market has been multifaceted, it broadly materialized through two channels. The first was through the voluntary reduction in consumer and business activities, especially contact-intensive ones, out of fear of infection. The other was through government containment policies, such as various social distancing measures and lockdowns of large swaths of the economy, especially targeted toward jobs categorized as "nonessential."The destructive economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was distributed unequally across the population. A worker's gender, race and ethnicity, age, education, industry, and occupation all mattered. We analyze the initial negative effect and its lingering effect through the recovery phase, across demographic and socioeconomic groups. The initial negative impact on employment was larger for women, minorities, the less educated, and the young whether or not we account for the industries and occupations they worked in. By February 2021, however, the differential effects across groups had gotten much smaller overall and had entirely vanished once the different industries and occupations they work in are taken into account. In particular, the differential effects between men and women vanished with or without the industry and occupation compositions taken into account, indicating that women's progress in the labor market over the past decades has not been wiped out by the pandemic. Across race and ethnicity, Hispanics and Asians were the worse hit but made up most of the lost ground, while the initial impact on Blacks was smaller but their recovery was slower. (JEL J21, J15, J16) Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Review, Forthcoming 2021.Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee is a reader at Queen Mary University of London. Minsung Park is a Ph.D. candidate at Washington University in St. Louis. Yongseok Shin is a professor of economics at Washington University in St. Louis and a research fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. We thank Juan Sanchez, Co-Editor-in Chief, and an anonymous referee for several helpful suggestions. We also benefited from our conversations with Alyssa Fowers of the Washington Post. Sang Yoon (Tim) Lee gratefully acknowledges financial support from the British Academy (grant COV19\201483).

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“…Two exceptions areGallant et al (2020) andForsythe et al (2020b), both of which stress the unusually high share of temporary layoffs in the current recession as complicating standard job search models, but differing in interpretation of existing labor market slack and the likely rate of recovery. Neither focuses on subgroups or regional variation.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%