Effects of social distancing policy on labor market outcomes

By Sumedha Gupta, Laura Montenovo, Thuy Nguyen, Felipe Lozano-Rojas, Ian M. Schmutte, Kosali Simon, Bruce A. Weinberg, Coady Wing. Contemporary economic policy, 2020

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

US workers receive unemployment benefits if they lose their job, but not for reduced working hours. In alignment with the benefits incentives, we find that the labor market responded to COVID-19 and related closure-policies mostly on the extensive (12 pp outright job loss) margin. Exploiting timing variation in state closure-policies, difference-in-differences (DiD) estimates show, between March 12 and April 12, 2020, employment rate fell by 1.7 pp for every 10 extra days of state stay-at-home orders (SAH), with little effect on hours worked/earnings among those employed. Forty percentage of the unemployment was due to a nationwide shock, rest due to social-distancing policies, particularly among “non-essential” workers.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bb871818b3e903ba70b5e90929a575cd018e0b2b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Jonathan D. Ostry
2. Nour Tawk
3. Kinga Makovi
4. Anahit Sargsyan
5. Pragyan Deb
6. Davide Furceri
7. Malte Reichelt

In General Health Professions

1. Kinga Makovi
2. Anahit Sargsyan
3. Davide Furceri
4. Malte Reichelt

In Modeling and Simulation

1. Kinga Makovi
2. Anahit Sargsyan
3. Malte Reichelt

Citations in the corpus

• The Economic Effects of COVID-19 Containment Measures (2020, methodology): “Gupta et al. (2020) demonstrate that stay-athome orders led to large increases in unemployment, using data from the US Current Population Survey, and mobility data.”
• The impact of COVID-19 on gender inequality in the labor market and gender-role attitudes (2020, background): “…hand, the economic downturn led companies to downsize or forced them into bankruptcy, which for many employees meant working fewer hours or for partial pay or losing their jobs entirely (Adams-Prassl et al. 2020; Béland et al. 2020; Brodeur et al. 2020; Coibion et al. 2020; Gupta 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).”
• A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, unknown): “Accounting for cross-state variation in the timing of business closures and stay-at-home mandates in the United States, Gupta et al. (2020) find that the employment rate in the United States falls by about 1.7 percentage points for every extra 10 days that a state experienced a stay-at-home mandate…”