US AND UK LABOUR MARKETS BEFORE AND DURING THE COVID-19 CRASH

By David Bell, David G. Blanchflower. National Institute Economic Review, 2020

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We examine labour market performance in the US and the UK prior to the onset of the Covid-19 crash. We then track the changes that have occurred in the months and days from the beginning of March 2020 using what we call the Economics of Walking About (EWA) that shows a collapse twenty times faster and much deeper than the Great Recession. We examine unemployment insurance claims by state by day in the US as well as weekly national data. We track the distributional impact of the shock and show that already it is hitting the most vulnerable groups who are least able to work from home the hardest – the young, the least educated and minorities. We have no official labour market data for the UK past January but see evidence that job placements have fallen sharply. We report findings from an online poll fielded from 11–16 April 2020 showing that a third of workers in Canada and the US report that they have lost at least half of their income due to the Covid-19 crisis, compared with a quarter in the UK and 45 per cent in China. We estimate that the unemployment rate in the US is around 20 per cent in April. It is hard to know what it is in the UK given the paucity of data, but it has gone up a lot.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c96bc82a75f47c8126d2c0bb263e8f3b0e53a5d5

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. Ada Aversano
2. Vincenza Capone
3. Jos Akkermans
4. Alessandro Lo Presti

In General Health Professions

1. E. Robinson
2. A. Sutin
3. Vincenza Capone
4. M. Daly
5. Jos Akkermans
6. C. Quintana‐Domeque
7. Sonia Oreffice

In Social Psychology

1. Vincenza Capone
2. Jos Akkermans
3. C. Quintana‐Domeque
4. Sonia Oreffice

Citations in the corpus

• Longitudinal changes in mental health and the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2020, background): “Many young adults are at the margins of the labor market and may be disproportionally impacted by the employment declines associated with the pandemic (Bell & Blanchflower, 2020; Cortes, 2020).”
• Career Competencies and Career Success: On the Roles of Employability Activities and Academic Satisfaction During the School-to-Work Transition (2021, background): “These major economic effects may impact even more strongly on young adults entering the labor market, as research has shown that this group is especially vulnerable to labor market instabilities, also in light of the COVID-19 pandemic (Bell & Blanchflower, 2020).”