COVID-19 and Remote Work: An Early Look at US Data

Abstract

MIT's COUHES ruled this project exempt (project number E-2075). Code & Data: https:// github.com/johnjosephhorton/remote_work/. Thanks to Sam Lord for helpful comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w27344.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Tracking Labor Market Developments during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Preliminary Assessment

“…For comparison, during the entire Great Recession (between December 2007 andFebruary 2010) 8.8 million jobs were lost. Our estimates of employment losses are also comparable to those in other recent papers: Brynjolfsson et al (2020) estimate that about 16 million Americans lost jobs through April 5, while Coibion, Gorodnichenko and Weber (2020) estimate that about 20 million jobs were lost by April 8.…”

The U.S. Labor Market during the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession

“…The data allow us to produce a variety of metrics to measure high-frequency labor market changes 2 Our paper complements many recent papers which use a variety of different data sources to track labor market outcomes during the recent recession. A sampling of those papers includes: Bartik et al (2020a), Bartik et al (2020b) Barrero et al (2020), Bick and Blandin (2020), Brynjolfsson et al (2020), Chetty et al (2020), Dingel and Neiman (2020), Coibion et al (2020), Kahn et al (2020) and Kurmann et al (2020). As discussed above, our ADP data have advantages over the data used in many of these other papers in that they are nationally representative, have large sample sizes, track both employment and wages, and allow for the joint matching of individual workers to individual businesses.…”

Fatalism, Beliefs, and Behaviors During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Third, we contribute to the literature on how people update their beliefs in response to new information, and how this depends on individual characteristics, by for example showing that the treatments work less well for those that identify as conservative (see, for example, Eil and Rao (2011) and Garrett et al (2018)). Fourth, we contribute to the growing literature on how policymakers can best respond to the COVID-19 pandemic by showing that it is both possible, and important, to correct people's beliefs about the virus (Acemoglu et al, 2020;Alvarez et al, 2020;Baker et al, 2020;Berger et al, 2020;Brynjolfsson et al, 2020;Cappelen et al, 2020;Farboodi et al, 2020;Van Bavel et al, 2020). 10 Finally, our paper is related to the general economics literature on the relationship between beliefs and behavior.…”