The First Weeks of the Coronavirus Crisis: Who Got Hit, When and Why? Evidence from Norway

Abstract

This article is part of the report from the research project "Temporary and permanent layoffs under Covid-19". Thanks to the Norwegian Directorate of Labour and Welfare and Statistics Norway for supplying the registry data, to Trond Vigtel for assistance with the data, and to Maria Hoen for assistance with the linking of data from the O*NET database to Norwegian occupation codes. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. 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 They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

A Poorly Understood Disease? The Unequal Distribution of Excess Mortality Due to COVID-19 Across French Municipalities*

“…We make several contributions to the emerging literature on socio-economic aspects of COVID-19 consequences. A first strand of this literature highlighted the unequal consequences of the COVID crisis on individuals' labor market outcomes (Adams-Prassl et al, 2020;Alstadsaeter et al, 2020;Borjas and Cassidy, 2020;Fairlie et al, 2020;Montenovo et al, 2020;Yasenov, 2020). These papers tend to show that the crisis primarily affected vulnerable groups in terms of income or job loss, especially ethnic minorities.…”

A lockdown index to assess the economic impact of the coronavirus

“…Instead, our lockdown index relies on an occupation's need for physical proximity instead of the ability to perform the job from home, which we find more suitable, at least in the Swiss setting 5 . Similar lockdown indexes were applied by Béland et al (2020) and Mongey et al (2020) to the USA, by Pouliakas and Branka (2020) to the EU, and by Alstadsaeter et al (2020) to Norway. Using individual-level administrative data for Norway, Alstadsaeter et al (2020) could report individual labor market outcomes (unemployment, short-time work) and link them to the occupational characteristics.…”

“…We worked with individual data from a pre-crisis survey and highly aggregated official unemployment and short-time work figures. At the same time, researchers in Norway (Alstadsaeter et al 2020) were able to observe the labor market status of the universe of Norwegian workers in administrative data along with detailed information about worker, household, job, and firm characteristics. They were even able to match information about income payments and bank account balances.…”

Norwegian and U.S. Policies Alleviate Business Vulnerability Due to the Covid-19 Shock Equally Well

“…90% of all the new unemployed were laid off temporarily. As documented by Alstadsaeter et al (2020), there was a clear social gradient in who was laid off during the first weeks of the crisis, with a higher risk of layoff for employees with lower education, lower annual income, and lower hourly wage…”

“…11 The effects of the lockdown shock were heterogeneous in nature. Some sectors were forced to close down by the government, while others kept regular activity levels (Alstadsaeter et al, 2020). Figure 2 illustrates variation across industries in the effect of the crisis, as revealed by the application data.…”