Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-f46jp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-29T03:08:26.368Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

US AND UK LABOUR MARKETS BEFORE AND DURING THE COVID-19 CRASH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2020

David N.F. Bell  and
David G. Blanchflower
David N.F. Bell
Affiliation:
University of Stirling, IZA and CPC. E-mail: d.n.f.bell@stir.ac.uk.
David G. Blanchflower
Affiliation:
Dartmouth College, University of Stirling, GLO, Bloomberg and NBER. E-mail: David.G.Blanchflower@dartmouth-edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

We examine labour market performance in the US and the UK prior to the onset of the Covid-19 crash. We then track the changes that have occurred in the months and days from the beginning of March 2020 using what we call the Economics of Walking About (EWA) that shows a collapse twenty times faster and much deeper than the Great Recession. We examine unemployment insurance claims by state by day in the US as well as weekly national data. We track the distributional impact of the shock and show that already it is hitting the most vulnerable groups who are least able to work from home the hardest – the young, the least educated and minorities. We have no official labour market data for the UK past January but see evidence that job placements have fallen sharply. We report findings from an online poll fielded from 11–16 April 2020 showing that a third of workers in Canada and the US report that they have lost at least half of their income due to the Covid-19 crisis, compared with a quarter in the UK and 45 per cent in China. We estimate that the unemployment rate in the US is around 20 per cent in April. It is hard to know what it is in the UK given the paucity of data, but it has gone up a lot.

Keywords

employmentunemploymentunderemploymentCovid-19.J31J60J61
Type
Research Article
Information
National Institute Economic Review , Volume 252 , May 2020 , pp. R52 - R69
Copyright
© National Institute of Economic and Social Research, 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

We thank Jagjit Chadha, Philippa Dunne, Kevin Rinz and Alex Salmond for helpful discussions and comments.

References

REFERENCES

Arnade, C. (2019), Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America, Sentinel, Penguin.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2020), ‘Underemployment in Europe and the United States’, forthcoming, Industrial and Labour Relations Review. First online 22 November, 2019, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0019793919886527.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2019), ‘The well-being of the overemployed and the underemployed and the rise in depression in the UK’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 161, May, pp. 180–96.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2018a), ‘The lack of wage growth and the falling NAIRU”, National Institute Economic Review, 245(1), pp. R1–R16.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2018b), ‘Underemployment and the lack of wage pressure in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, 243(1), pp. R53–R61.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2014), ‘Labour market slack in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, 229(1), pp. F4–F11.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2013), ‘Underemployment in the UK revisited’, National Institute Economic Review, 224(1), pp. F8-F22.Google Scholar
Bell, D.N.F. and Blanchflower, D.G. (2011), ‘Youth underemployment in the UK in the Great Recession’, National Institute Economic Review, 215(1), pp. R1–R11.Google Scholar
Bick, A. and Blandin, A. (2020), ‘Real time labor market estimates during the 2020 coronavirus outbreak’, Working Paper. https://alexbick.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/1/3/101306056/bb_covid.pdfGoogle Scholar
Blanchflower, D.G. (2008), ‘Inflation expectations and monetary policy’, speech given at the Royal Society Edinburgh, 29 April 2008, https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/speech/2008/inflation-expectations-and-monetary-policy.Google Scholar
Blanchflower, D.G. (2013), ‘As good as it gets? The UK labour market in recession and recovery,’ National Institute Economic Review, February, 231, pp. F76-F80.Google Scholar
Blanchflower, D.G. (2019), Not Working: Where Have all The Good Jobs Gone?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.Google Scholar
Blanchflower, D.G. and. Oswald, A.J. (2019), ‘Unhappiness and pain in modern America: a review essay, and further evidence, on Carol Graham’s Happiness for All’, Journal of Economic Literature, June, 57(2), pp. 385-402.Google Scholar
Deaton, A. and Case, A. (2020), Deaths of Despair, Princeton University Press,Google Scholar
Dunn, M. (2018), ‘Who chooses part-time work and why?’ Monthly Labour Review, U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics, March.Google Scholar
Guyot, K. and Sawhill, I.V. (2020), ‘Telecommuting will likely continue long after the pandemic’, Brookings, 6 April 6, 2020.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D. and Krueger, A.B. (2006), ‘Developments in the measurement of subjective well-being,’ Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(1), Winter, pp. 3–24.Google Scholar
Kristof, N. and WuDunn, S. (2020), Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, Alfred A. Knopf.Google Scholar
Mousteri, V., Daly, M. and Delaney, L. (2020), ‘Underemployment and psychological distress: propensity matching score and fixed effects estimates from two large UK samples’, Social Science and Medicine, 244, January.Google Scholar
Quinones, S. (2015), Dreamland: the True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Reserve Board of Governors (2018), Report on the Well-being of U.S. households in 2017, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Rinz, K. (2020), ‘Understanding unemployment insurance claims and other labour market data during the COVID-19 pandemic,’ 9 April, working paper, Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications, U.S. Census Bureau.Google Scholar
Vance, J.D. (2017), A Hillbilly Elegy, A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, Harper.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Bell and Blanchflower supplementary material

Bell and Blanchflower supplementary material

Download Bell and Blanchflower supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 490.9 KB