Social Distancing,Labor Market Outcomes,and Job Characteristics in the COVID-19 Pandemic

• 作者: Suqin Ge Yu Zhou
• 来源期刊: 中国经济学前沿
• 年，卷（期）: 2020,（4）
• 所属期刊栏目: Symposium:Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic
• 页码范围: 478-520
• 页数: 43页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.3868/s060-011-020-0021-3

摘要

This study investigates the role of job characteristics on an individual's decisions to follow social distancing policies,work,and apply for unemployment in-surance in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.We use data that track millions of mobile devices and their daily movements across physical locations to measure whether the devices'owners leave their homes,or work part-time or full-time on a given day,and we also collect data on weekly unemployment insurance claims.We find that the presence of jobs with a high work-from-home capacity in a region increases the ability of people to follow social distancing policies and decreases their unemployment risk,whereas the presence of jobs with high physical proximity decreases the incidences of following social distancing policies and unemployment and increases the incidence of work during the pandemic.These heterogeneous re-sponses based on local job characteristics persist even conditional on a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic variables.