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

By Alexander W. Bartik, Marianne Bertrand, Feng Lin, Jesse M. Rothstein, Matt Unrath. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2020

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ABSTRACT:We use traditional and nontraditional data to measure the collapse and partial recovery of the US labor market from March to early July, contrast this downturn to previous recessions, and provide preliminary evidence on the effects of the policy response. For hourly workers at both small and large businesses, nearly all of the decline in employment occurred between March 14 and 28. It was driven by low-wage services, particularly the retail and leisure and hospitality sectors. A large share of the job losses in small businesses reflected firms that closed entirely, though many subsequently reopened. Firms that were already unhealthy were more likely to close and less likely to reopen, and disadvantaged workers were more likely to be laid off and less likely to return. Most laid-off workers expected to be recalled, and this was predictive of rehiring. Shelter-in-place orders drove only a small share of job losses. Last, states that received more small business loans from the Paycheck Protection Program and states with more generous unemployment insurance benefits had milder declines and faster recoveries. We find no evidence that high unemployment insurance replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7139353bb4bb77bafa883a058eba72fa34ceb90

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Citations in the corpus

COVID-19 Is Also a Reallocation Shock (2020, background): “…shock also caused gross staffing gains: new hires equal to 3.8 percent of March 1 employment, and new contractors and leased workers equal 13 Bartik et al. (2020) find a 40 percent employment contraction from 31 January to late March/early April in their survey of American firms with fewer…”
How Did COVID-19 and Stabilization Policies Affect Spending and Employment? A New Real-Time Economic Tracker Based on Private Sector Data (2020, result): “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.”
Heterogeneous Labor Market Impacts of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, methodology): “The CPS is sponsored jointly by the US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).”
Did the paycheck protection program hit the target? (2020, unknown): “29 Following Bartik et al. (2020a) , we deﬁne a business shutdown as businesses that report zero hours worked during a week using the data from HomeBase. distortions during the second round, we ﬁnd that the relationship between the share of business shutdowns in the week of March 22nd–March 28th and”
US unemployment insurance replacement rates during the pandemic (2020, background): “However, this is an empirical question, and so far early research has not found evidence that high replacement rates are deterring aggregate employment (see e.g. Altonji et al., 2020; Bartik et al., 2020, and Dube, 2020).”
The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on business expectations (2021, background): “Moreover, other business surveys, such as in Bartik et al. (2020) tell a consistent story.”
Fiscal policy during a pandemic (2020, background): “Bartik et al. (2020) find that states that received more business loans and states with more generous UI benefits experienced milder declines and faster recoveries, and they find no evidence that high UI replacement rates led to job losses or slower rehiring.”
The Targeting and Impact of Paycheck Protection Program Loans to Small Businesses (2020, unknown): “Recent research has studied the effects of PPP loans, exploiting variation in PPP loan receipt intensity between firms of different sizes (Chetty et al. 2020, Autor et al. 2020) and locations (Granja et al. 2020, and Bartik et al. 2020c).”