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Working Paper
Demand-Supply imbalance during the Covid-19 pandemic: The role of fiscal policy
To mitigate the health and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide engaged in massive fiscal support programs. We show that generous fiscal support contributed to an increase in the demand for consumption goods during the pandemic, but industrial production did not adjust quickly enough to meet the sharp increase in demand. This imbalance between supply and demand across countries led to high inflation. Our findings suggest a sizable role for fiscal policy in affecting price stability.
Working Paper
"Missing" Workers and "Missing" Jobs Since the Pandemic
Since the start of the pandemic the U.S. labor market has been characterized as being plagued by missing jobs, i.e. payroll employment has fallen more than five million jobs short of its pre-pandemic trend, and missing workers, i.e. the participation rate has declined by 1.2 percentage points: A pandemic-induced shortage of workers has restrained job creation and, as a result, been a substantial drag on post-pandemic job growth. In this paper, we show that this is a misinterpretation of the data for two reasons. The first is that the number of missing jobs is inflated because it is based on ...