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Jel Classification:J21 

Working Paper
Unemployment Paths in a Pandemic Economy

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. economy and labor market. We assess the initial spike in unemployment due to the virus response and possible paths for the official unemployment rate through 2021. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the path for measured unemployment, depending on the path of the virus and containment measures and their impact on reported job search activity. We assess potential unemployment paths based on historical patterns of monthly flows in and out of unemployment, adjusted for unique features of the virus economy. The possible paths vary widely, but absent ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2020-18

Report
Allocation and Employment Effect of the Paycheck Protection Program

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) was a large and unprecedented small-business support program enacted as a response to the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. The PPP administered almost $800 billion in loans and grants to small businesses through the banking system. However, there is still limited consensus on its overall effect on employment. This paper explores why it is challenging to estimate the effect of the PPP. To do so, we first focus on the timing of the allocation of PPP funds across regions and firms. Counties less affected by COVID-19 and with a larger presence of ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Journal Article
Cell Phone Data Suggest Persistent Differences in Work from Home by Income, Race, and Education during the Pandemic

Social-distancing policies to combat the spread of COVID-19 led to an initial spike in work from home. We use high-frequency cell phone geolocation data to assess how work from home has evolved since then. We show that work from home declined as restrictions eased but remains above pre-pandemic levels. In addition, we find that differences across income, race, and education in work from home that emerged with the pandemic persist a year later.
Economic Bulletin , Issue March 31, 2021 , Pages 4

Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas—allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes—as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as micro data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...
Working Papers , Paper 1810

Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-3

Journal Article
Data Revisions of Aggregate Hours Worked: Implications for the Europe-U.S. Hours Gap

In this article, we document that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Conference Board?s Total Economy Database (TED) have substantially revised their measures of hours worked over time. Relying on the data used by Rogerson (2006) and Ohanian et al. (2008), we find that, for 2003, hours worked per person in Europe is 18 percent lower than hours worked in the United States. Using the 2016 releases of the same data for 2003 yields a gap that is 40 percent smaller?that is, only 11 percent lower. Using labor force survey data, which are less subject to data ...
Review , Volume 101 , Issue 1 , Pages 45-56

Working Paper
Labor Market Effects of Credit Constraints: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

We exploit the 1998 and 2003 constitutional amendment in Texas?allowing home equity loans and lines of credit for non-housing purposes?as natural experiments to estimate the effect of easier credit access on the labor market. Using state-level as well as county-level data and the synthetic control approach, we find that easier access to housing credit led to a notably lower labor force participation rate between 1998 and 2007. We show that our findings are remarkably robust to improved synthetic control methods based on insights from machine-learning. We explore treatment effect heterogeneity ...
Working Papers , Paper 1810

Working Paper
The Impact of the Age Distribution on Unemployment: Evidence from US States

Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a "shift-share" method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper uses state-level data to revisit the influence of the age distribution on unemployment in the United States. We examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population — the focus of most previous work — and extend the date range of analysis ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-27

Working Paper
Job Polarization and the Natural Rate of Unemployment in the United States

I present a new estimate of the natural rate of unemployment in the United States that accounts for changes in the age, sex, and skill composition of the labor force. Using micro-level data from the Current Population Survey for the period 1994-2017, I find that the natural rate of unemployment declined by 0.5 percentage point since 1994 and currently stands at 4.5 percent. My projections show that ongoing demographic and technological changes could lower the trend rate further to 4.4 percent by the end of 2022.
Research Working Paper , Paper RWP 18-3

Working Paper
The Covid-19 Pandemic Spurred Growth in Automation: What Does this Mean for Minority Workers?

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated trends in automation as many employers seek to save on labor costs amid widespread illness, increased worker leverage, and market pressures to onshore supply chains. While existing research has explored how automation may displace non-specialized jobs, there is typically less attention paid to how this displacement may interact with preexisting structural issues around racial inequality. This analysis updates that of a 2021 Brookings paper by the authors, finding that Black and Hispanic workers continue to be overrepresented in the 30 occupations with the ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP 2023-06

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