Real-Time Labor Market Estimates During the 2020 Coronavirus Outbreak

By Alexander Bick, A. Blandin. Social Science Research Network, 2020

128 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Official labor market statistics for the United States are collected once a month and published with a three week delay. In normal times, this procedure results in timely and useful statistics. But these are not normal times. Currently, the most recent statistics refer to August 9-15; new statistics will not be available until October 2. In the meantime, the Coronavirus outbreak is rapidly reshaping the US economy. This project aims to provide data on labor market conditions every other week, and to publish results the same week, thereby reducing the information lag. We do so via an online labor market survey of a sample representative of the US working age population, which we refer to as the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS). The core labor market questions in the RPS follow the government survey (the CPS), which allows us to construct estimates consistent with theirs. Thus far the RPS covers every other week from March 29 through August 29. The latest RPS estimates from the week of August 23-29 present mixed messages for the labor market recovery among working age adults between early August and late August.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1180ba71f465ac93c4cc08a5ea2fc6246b292f6

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Citations in the corpus

The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, unknown): “Consistent with earlier work (Coibion, Gorodnichenko and Weber, 2020, Bick and Blandin, 2020), we find a massive decline in the employment rate: the rate fell by 5 percentage points which is larger than the cumulative drop in the employment-to-population ratio during and after the Great Recession.”
The Long-Term Distributional and Welfare Effects of Covid-19 School Closures (2020, unknown): “According to Bick and Blandin (2020) the drop of hours relative to February 2020 during the six months March to August was 17.3%, which in our two year model under the optimistic scenario of full recovery in the third quarter translates into a reduction of aggregate hours by 17.3/4% = 4.3%. Accordin”
Inequality in the impact of the coronavirus shock: Evidence from real time surveys (2020, background): “…data (Cajner et al. 2020), data from businesses (Chetty et al. 2020), job ads (Kahn, Lange and Wiczer 2020), public survey data (e.g. Benzeval et al. 2020; Coibion, Gorodnichenko and Weber 2020), and own data collected through survey agencies (Bick and Blandin 2020; von Gaudecker et al. 2020).”