The heterogeneous effects of COVID-19 on labor market flows: evidence from administrative data

Causes and costs of global COVID-19 vaccine inequity

Despite the rapid development of safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines and the widely recognized health and economic benefits of vaccination, there exist stark differences in vaccination rates across country income groups. While more than 70% of the population is fully vaccinated in high-income countries, vaccination rates in low-income countries are only around 30%. The paper reviews the factors behind global COVID-19 vaccine inequity and the health, social, and economic costs triggered by this inequity. The main contributors to vaccine inequity include vaccine nationalism, intellectual property rights, constraints in manufacturing capacity, poor resilience of healthcare systems, and vaccine hesitancy. Vaccine inequity has high costs, including preventable deaths and cases of illnesses in low-income countries, slow economic recovery, and large learning losses among children. Increasing vaccination rates in low-income countries is in the self-interest of higher-income countries as it may prevent the emergence of new variants and continuous disruptions to global supply chains.

The impact of Covid-19 lockdown on the gender gap in the Italian labour market

We study the gendered impact of the nationwide lockdown (March-May 2020) due to the Covid-19 pandemic on the Italian labour market. Based on Labour Force Survey data on the first three quarters of 2020, we define a Triple Difference-in-Differences (DDD) strategy by exploiting the exact timing of the lockdown implementation. After controlling for several individual and job-related characteristics, we found that in non essential sectors (treated group) the lockdown enlarged pre-existent gender inequalities in the extensive margin of employment: the probability of job loss got 0.7 p.p. higher among female workers compared to their male counterparts, and this difference was mainly detected during the reopening period rather than in the strict lockdown phase. The probability to benefit from the wage guarantee fund (CIG), a subsidy traditionally granted by the government for partial or full-time hours reduction, was also higher for female compared to male treated workers (3.6 p.p.), both during the lockdown and in the reopening phase. This marks a great change with respect to the past, as the application of short-term work compensation schemes was traditionally restricted to male-dominated sectors of employment. On the other hand, no significant gender differences emerged among the treated group either in the intensive margin (working hours) or in terms of remote working, at least in the medium-term.

The short-term impact of the 2020 pandemic lockdown on employment in Greece

This paper analyzes the short-term employment impact of the COVID-19 lockdown in Greece during the first few months following the pandemic onset. During the initial lockdown period, aggregate employment was lower by almost 9 percentage points than it would have been expected based on pre-pandemic employment trends. However, due to a government intervention that prohibited layoffs, this was not due to higher separation rates. The overall short-term employment impact was due to lower hiring rates. To uncover the mechanism behind this, we use a difference-in-differences framework, and show that tourism-related activities, which are exposed to seasonal variation, had significantly lower employment entry rates in the months following the pandemic onset compared to non-tourism activities. Our results highlight the relevance of the timing of unanticipated shocks in economies with strong seasonal patterns, and the relative effectiveness of policy interventions to partly absorb the consequences of such shocks.

Impact of Covid-19 on informal employment: A case study of women domestic workers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan

COVID-19 indiscriminately impacted all the segments of the global society. Due to the unstructured job market, women in the informal sector were at high risk to experience the adverse effects of the pandemic. This paper aims to explore the impact of COVID-19 on women domestic workers and their families. Semi structured interviews conducted with fifty-four women domestic workers in three districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan were analyzed in five themes: disruption caused by lockdown, loss of livelihood, economic hardships, social support mechanism, and challenges faced during the pandemic. The study underlines that the pandemic left severe impacts on access to basic services, employment, food security at household level and pattern of expenditures. The plummeting economic activities led to sudden drops in earnings that forced families to sell their assets and incur debts. Respondents lamented over the social support system and considered it a necessary but not sufficient condition for uplifting the lives of the poor. Strains in marital relationships led to stress, anxiety and domestic violence among families. The utmost concern was the restoration of economic activities and urgent policy interventions to strengthen social safety measures for the vulnerable segments of society.

Relationship quality and support for family policy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Objective

We examined how relationship satisfaction changed during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, as well as how relationship satisfaction related to public policy support.

Background

Conservation of resources (COR) theory suggests that societal-level stressors (such as a global pandemic) threaten familial and individual resources, straining couple relationships. Relationship satisfaction is in turn linked with important individual, familial, and societal outcomes, necessitating research on how COVID-19 impacted this facet of relationships.

Method

Drawing from an international project on COVID-19 and family life, participants included 734 married and cohabiting American parents of children under 18 years of age.

Results

Findings revealed relationship satisfaction declined moderately compared to retrospective reports of relationship satisfaction prior to the pandemic. This decline was more precipitous for White individuals, women, parents less involved in their children's lives, and those reporting higher levels of depressive symptoms. We also found that higher relationship satisfaction was associated with higher levels of support for family policy, particularly for men. At higher levels of relationship satisfaction, men and women had similarly high levels of support for family policy, while at lower levels, women's support for family policy was significantly higher.

Conclusion

The COVID-19 pandemic likely amplified facets of social inequality, which is especially concerning when considering the large socioeconomic gaps prior to the pandemic.

Implications

Therapists, researchers, and policy makers should examine how relationship satisfaction may have changed during the pandemic because relationship satisfaction is linked to child and adult well-being and relationship dissolution. Further, the link between relationship satisfaction and support for family policy deserves further scrutiny.

Do immigrants shield the locals? Exposure to COVID-related risks in the European Union

This article investigates the relationship between immigration and the exposure of native workers to health and labor-market risks arising from the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. Using various measures of occupational risks based on European Union labor force survey data, we find that immigrant workers, especially those from lower-income member countries in Eastern Europe or from outside the EU, face greater exposure than their native-born peers to both income and health-shocks related to COVID-19. We also show that native workers living in regions with a higher concentration of immigrants are less exposed to some of the income and health risks associated with the pandemic. To assess whether this relationship is causal, we use a Bartik-type shift-share instrument to control for potential bias and unobservable factors that would lead migrants to self-select into more vulnerable occupations across regions. The results show that the presence of immigrant workers has a causal effect in reducing the exposure of native workers to various risks by enabling the native-born workers to move into jobs that could be undertaken from the safety of their homes or with lower face-to-face interactions. The effects on the native-born population are more pronounced for high-skilled workers than for low-skilled workers, and for women than for men. We do not find significant effect of immigration on wages and employment-indicating that the effects are mostly driven by a reallocation of natives from less safe jobs to safer jobs.

The heterogeneous effects of COVID-19 on labor markets: People's movement and non-pharmaceutical interventions

The paper investigates the heterogeneous effect of a policy-induced decline in people's mobility on the Japanese labor market outcome during the early COVID-19 period. Regressing individual-level labor market outcomes on prefecture-level mobility changes using policy stringency index as an instrument, our two-stage least squares estimator presents the following findings. First, the number of people absent from work increased for all groups of individuals, but the magnitude was greater for workers with non-regular employment status, low-educated people, females especially with children, and those aged 31 to 45 years. Second, while work hours decreased for most groups, the magnitude was especially greater for business owners without employees and those aged 31 to 45. Third, the negative effect on unemployment was statistically significant for older males who worked as regular workers in the previous year. The impact was particularly considerable for those aged 60 and 65, thus suggesting that they lost their re-employment opportunity due to COVID-19. Fourth, all these adverse effects were greater for people working in service and sales occupations. Fifth, a counterfactual experiment of more stringent policies indicates that while an average worker would lose JPY 3857 in weekly earnings by shortening their work hours, the weekly loss for those aged 31 to 45 years and working in service and sales occupations would be about JPY 13,842.

Local inequalities of the COVID-19 crisis

This paper assesses the pandemic's impact on Italian local economies with the newly developed machine learning control method for counterfactual building. Our results document that the economic effects of the COVID-19 shock vary dramatically across the Italian territory and are spatially uncorrelated with the epidemiological pattern of the first wave. The largest employment losses occurred in areas characterized by high exposure to social aggregation risks and pre-existing labor market fragilities. Lastly, we show that the hotspots of the COVID-19 crisis do not overlap with those of the Great Recession. These findings call for a place-based policy response to address the uneven economic geography of the pandemic.

Regional Coronavirus Hotspots During the COVID-19 Outbreak in the Netherlands

We explore the impact of COVID-19 hotspots and regional lockdowns on the Dutch labour market during the outbreak of COVID-19. Using weekly administrative panel microdata for 50 per cent of Dutch employees until the end of March 2020, we study whether individual labour market outcomes, as measured by employment, working hours and hourly wages, were more strongly affected in provinces where COVID-19 confirmed cases, hospitalizations and mortality were relatively high. The evidence suggests that labour market outcomes were negatively affected in all regions and local higher virus case numbers did not reinforce this decline. This suggests that preventive health measures should be at the regional level, isolating hotspots from low-risk areas.

Trade-off between job losses and the spread of COVID-19 in Japan

This paper quantitatively analyzes the trade-off between job losses and the spread of COVID-19 in Japan. We derive an empirical specification from the social planner's resource constraint under the susceptible, infected, recovered, and deaths (SIRD) model and estimate how job losses and the case growth rate are related to people's mobility using the Japanese prefecture-level panel data on confirmed cases, involuntary job losses, people's mobility, and teleworkability. Our findings are summarized as follows. First, we find that a decrease in mobility driven by containment policies is associated with an increase in involuntary job separations, but the high teleworkability mitigates the negative effect of decreased mobility on job losses. Second, estimating how the case growth is related to people's mobility and past cases, we find that the case growth rate is positively related to an increase in people's mobility but negatively associated with past confirmed cases. Third, using these estimates, we provide a quantitative analysis of the trade-off between job losses and the number of confirmed cases. Taking Tokyo in July 2020 as a benchmark, we find that the cost of saving 1 job per month is 2.3 more confirmed cases per month in the short run of 1 month. When we consider a trade-off for 3 months from July to September of 2020, protecting 1 job per month requires 6.6 more confirmed cases per month. Therefore, the trade-off becomes worse substantially in the longer run of 3 months, reflecting the exponential case growth when the people's mobility is high.