Unemployment Effects of Stay-at-Home Orders: Evidence from High-Frequency Claims Data

Abstract

We use the high-frequency, decentralized implementation of Stay-at-Home orders in the U.S. to disentangle the labor market effects of SAH orders from the general economic disruption wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that each week of SAH exposure increased a state's weekly initial unemployment insurance (UI) claims by 1.9% of its employment level relative to other states. A back-of-the-envelope calculation implies that, of the 17 million UI claims between March 14 and April 4, only 4 million were attributable to SAH orders. We present a currency union model to provide conditions for mapping this estimate to aggregate employment losses.

The Early Labor Market Impacts of COVID-19 in Developing Countries: Evidence from High-Frequency Phone Surveys

“…Our work contributes to the recent and growing literature examining the labor market impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world. Most analysis of early labor market impacts has focused on high-income countries, including Australia (Guven, Sotirakopoulos and Ulker, 2020), Austria (Bamieh and Ziegler, 2020;Gulyas and Pytka, 2020), Italy (Casarico and Lattanzio, 2020), Canada (Jones, Lange, Riddell and Warman, 2020), Denmark (Mattana, Smeets and Warzynski, 2020), the European Union (Pouliakas and Branka, 2020), Germany (Alipour, Falck and Schu¨ller, 2020), Greece (Betcherman et al, 2020), Israel (Miaari, Sabbah-Karkabi and Loewenthal, 2020), Japan (Kikuchi, Kitao and Mikoshiba, 2020;Morikawa, 2020), the Netherlands (Hassink, Kalb and Meekes, 2020;von Gaudecker et al, 2020a,b), the Republic of Korea (Aum, Lee and Shin, 2020), Singapore (Kim, Koh and Zhang, 2020), Sweden (Hensvik, Barbanchon and Rathelot, 2020a;Juranek, Paetzold, Winner and Zoutman, 2020), the United Kingdom (Costa Dias et al, 2020;Crossley, Fisher and Low, 2021;Etheridge, Tang and Wang, 2020;Wadsworth, 2020), and the United States (Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin and Rauh, 2020;Angelucci et al, 2020;Avdiu and Nayyar, 2020;Baek, McCrory, Messer and Mui, 2021;Bartik et al, 2020a,b;Beland, Brodeur and Wright, 2020;Cheng et al, 2020;Chetty et al, 2020;Coibion, Gorodnichenko and Weber, 2020;Cowan, 2020;Dalton, Handwerker and Loewenstein, 2020;Dingel and Neiman, 2020;Forsythe, Kahn, Lange and Wiczer, 2020;Gallant, Kroft, Lange and Notowidigdo...…”

Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak

“…We found only weak correlations between WFH and the policy indices across geographies. Studies of the behavioral responses in the pandemic in the U.S. typically find relatively small effects of policy, e.g Kong and Prinz (2020),Baek et al (2021). orGoolsbee and Syverson (2021).…”

The effect of COVID-19 on the economy: Evidence from an early adopter of localized lockdowns

“…However, there is limited and non-conclusive evidence on the economic costs of non-pharmaceutical interventions. Researchers in the United States have examined how non-pharmaceutical interventions have impacted unemployment insurance, employment, or store client traffic [ 28 , 30 , 36 - 40 ]. Some research suggests that lockdowns explain a small share of the total economic activity decline [ 28 , 36 - 38 ].…”

“…Researchers in the United States have examined how non-pharmaceutical interventions have impacted unemployment insurance, employment, or store client traffic [ 28 , 30 , 36 - 40 ]. Some research suggests that lockdowns explain a small share of the total economic activity decline [ 28 , 36 - 38 ]. Others [ 30 , 39 , 40 ] have found that lockdowns play a relevant role in explaining the drop in economic activity.…”