Unemployment Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders: Evidence from High-Frequency Claims Data

By C. Baek, Peter B. McCrory, Todd Messer, Preston Mui. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020

173 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We use the high-frequency, decentralized implementation of stay-at-home (SAH) orders in the United States to disentangle the labor market effects of SAH orders from the general economic disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that each week of SAH exposure increased a state's weekly initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims by 1.9% of its employment level relative to other states. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that of the 17 million UI claims between March 14 and April 4, only 4 million were attributable to SAH orders. We present a currency union model to provide conditions for mapping this estimate to aggregate employment losses.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56c70a2662fb91d77657c5d0beb2bd531e4b3156

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Citations in the corpus

• Do Stay-at-Home Orders Cause People to Stay at Home? Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders on Consumer Behavior (2020, background): “In other important exceptions to the literature’s focus on mobility, Baek et al. (2020) show that stay-at-home orders increase unemployment insurance claims in affected states.”
• Effects of social distancing policy on labor market outcomes (2020, unknown): “Baek et al. (2020) come to a broadly similar conclusion with UI records, examining a longer time period.”