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Working Paper
Women’s Labor Force Exits during COVID-19: Differences by Motherhood, Race, and Ethnicity
While the descriptive impacts of the pandemic on women have been well documented in the aggregate, we know much less about the impacts of the pandemic on different groups of women. After controlling for detailed job and demographic characteristics, including occupation and industry, we find that the pandemic led to significant excess labor force exits among women living with children under age six relative to women without children. We also find evidence of larger increases in exits among lower-earning women. The presence of children predicted larger increases in exits during the pandemic ...
Working Paper
Equilibrium Unemployment: The Role of Discrimination
U.S. labor markets are increasingly diverse and persistently unequal between genders, races and ethnicities, skill levels, and age groups. We use a structural model to decompose the observed differences in labor market outcomes across demographic groups in terms of underlying wedges in fundamentals. Of particular interest is the potential role of discrimination, either taste-based or statistical. Our model is a version of the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model extended to include a life cycle, learning by doing, a nonparticipation state, and informational frictions. The model exhibits ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Asian American Employment
This paper documents that the employment of Asian Americans with no college education has been especially hard hit by the economic crisis associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. This cannot be explained by differences in demographics or in job characteristics. Asian American employment is also harder hit unconditional on education. This suggests that different selection into education levels across ethnic groups alone cannot explain the main results. This pattern does not apply to the 2008 economic crisis. Our findings suggest that this period might be fundamentally different from the previous ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Discrimination and the Racial Unemployment Gap: Can Monetary Policy Make a Difference?
Black workers experience a higher unemployment rate, as well as more volatile employment dynamics, than white workers, and the racial unemployment rate gap is largely unexplained by observable characteristics. We develop a New Keynesian model with search and matching frictions in the labor market, endogenous separations, and employer discrimination against Black workers to explain these outcomes. The model is consistent with key features of the aggregate economy and is able to explain key labor market disparities across racial groups. We then use this model to assess the effects of the ...
Working Paper
Women's Labor Force Exits during COVID-19: Differences by Motherhood, Race, and Ethnicity
In this paper, we study declines in women's labor force participation by race and ethnicity as well as the presence of children. We find that increases in labor force exits were larger for Black women, Latinas, and women living with children. In particular, we find larger increases in pandemic-era labor force exits among women living with children under age 6 and among lower-earning women living with school-age children after controlling for detailed job and demographic characteristics. Latinas and Black women also had larger increases in labor force exits during the pandemic relative to ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Asian American Employment
Recent studies have documented the disparate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on labor market outcomes for different racial groups. This paper adds to this literature by documenting that the employment of Asian Americans - in particular those with no college education - has been especially hard hit by the economic crisis associated with the onset of the pandemic. This can only partly be explained by differences in demographics, local market conditions, and job characteristics, and it also cannot be entirely explained by possible different selection into education levels across ethnic groups. ...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 Pandemic and Asian American Employment
This paper documents that the employment of Asian Americans with no college education has been especially hard hit by the economic crisis associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. This cannot be explained by differences in demographics or in job characteristics, and the pattern does not apply to the 2008 economic crisis. We find some evidence that the effect is larger in occupations with more interpersonal tasks. Asian American employment is also harder hit unconditional on education. This suggests that different selection into education levels across ethnic groups alone cannot explain the main ...
Working Paper
Who’s In and Who’s Out under Workplace COVID Symptom Screening?
COVID symptom screening, a new workplace practice, is likely to affect many millions of American workers in the coming months. Eleven states already require and federal guidance recommends frequent screening of employees for infection symptoms. This paper provides some of the first empirical work exploring the tradeoffs employers face in using daily symptom screening. First, we find that common symptom checkers will likely screen out up to 7 percent of workers each day, depending on the measure used. Second, we find that the measures used will matter for three reasons: many respondents report ...