Is the Cure Worse than the Problem Itself? Immediate Labor Market Effects of COVID-19 Case Rates and School Closures in the U.S.

By Felipe Rojas, Xuan Jiang, Laura Montenovo, Kosali I. Simon, Bruce A. Weinberg, Coady Wing. 2020

115 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The relationship between population health and measures of economic well-being and economic activity is a long standing topic in health economics (Preston, 1975; Cutler, Deaton, and Lleras-Muney, 2006; Ruhm, 2000). The conceptual issues in analyzing the complicated link between health and economic well-being are central to understanding the implications of the COVID-19 epidemic in the United States The public health shock of the epidemic has direct economic impacts, but the mitigation policies governments are using to control the spread of the virus may also damage economic activity. We estimate how state job market conditions respond to state COVID-19 infections and school closures, which are the earliest of the major mitigation policies. Mitigation policies and local epidemiological conditions explain some of the variation in unemployment patterns. However, the historically unprecedented increase in new UI claims during the weeks of March 15-21 and March 22-28 was largely across-the-board and occurred in all states. This suggests most of the economic disruption was driven by the health shock itself. Put differently, it appears that the labor market slowdown was due primarily to a nationwide response to evolving epidemiological conditions and that individual state policies and own epidemiologic situations have had a comparatively modest effect.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64997b4e251da291d04645c89d05719c454103f4

Citations in the corpus

• Sheltering in place and domestic violence: Evidence from calls for service during COVID-19 (2020, unknown): “However, there is evidence that government-mandated stay-athome orders can only explain a portion of the pandemic's economic impact (Rojas et al., 2020; Gupta et al., 2020; Aum et al., 2020).”
• A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, unknown): “The major increases in unemployment observed in the United States are driven partly by lockdowns and social distancing policies (Rojas et al., 2020).”
• Fear, lockdown, and diversion: Comparing drivers of pandemic economic decline 2020 (2020, unknown): “Papers using employment and jobs data include Forsythe et al. (2020), Rojas et al. (2020), Bartik et al. (2020), Bartik et al. (2020), Gupta et al. (2020a), and Aum et al. (2020).”