Which Workers Bear the Burden of Social Distancing?

Abstract

Thanks to SafeGraph for making their data available to us, as well as other researchers studying the consequences of the Coronavirus epidemic. Thanks to Gianluca Violante and Greg Kaplan for making available their codes. Our measures at the three digit occupation level are available on our websites. The views expressed in this study are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Federal Reserve System, or the National Bureau of Economic Research. Replication code is available on the authors' websites. 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 They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Measuring the Labor Market at the Onset of the COVID-19 Crisis

“…We are not the only ones studying the labor market at this time. Allcott et al (2020), Alon et al (2020), Cajner, et al (2020a [this volume]; 2020b), Chetty et al (2020), Cortes and Forsythe (2020), Dey et al (2020), Goolsbee and Syverson (2020), Gupta et al (2020), Khan et al (2020), Kurmann et al (2020), Lin and Meissner (2020), and Mongey et al (2020) all conduct exercises that are related to ours. There are surely many others that we do not cite here.…”

Working Remotely and the Supply-side Impact of Covid-19

“…Last, our paper is related to recent work by Dingel and Neiman (2020), Alon et al (2020) and Mongey, Pilossoph, and Weinberg (2020). Dingel and Neiman (2020)…”

“…Dingel and Neiman (2020) and Alon et al (2020) mainly focus on demographic differences among workers who can and cannot work remotely; by contrast, we are interested in how the ability to work from home is related to outcomes. In this respect, our work is closest to Mongey et al (2020), who explore how the Dingel and Neiman (2020) measure and a measure of occupations requiring high physical proximity relate to differential outcomes across workers. Though the first part of our analysis also explores worker-level outcomes, our primary focus is on firms.…”

“…Further information about the data are available here: https://docs.safegraph.com/docs/weekly-patterns. See also, e.g., Mongey et al (2020) and Farboodi, Jarosch, and Shimer (2020) for additional applications of SafeGraph data to the study of Covid-19.…”

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

“…Recent research by Mongey et al (2020) suggests that low-income workers tend to work in "social" sectors and the large decline observed in these sectors will result in job loss concentrated among lower wage workers. The gray points (triangles) explore this hypothesis by introducing firm size and 2-digit NAICS industry fixed effects as additional regressors.…”