Measuring employment during COVID-19: challenges and opportunities
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Measuring employment during COVID‑19: challenges and opportunities Gerald D. Cohen1 Published online: 13 November 2020 © National Association for Business Economics 2020
Abstract Measuring the economy during COVID-19 has created a set of hurdles and prospects for the U.S. statistical agencies, the private sector, and academia. This included how to deal with unprecedented movements in economic variables while ensuring data quality. At the same time, new entrants released data that are sometimes at odds with gold standard releases. Given the multitude of data, this article focuses on both existing and new ways to track the employment statistics. The results leave more questions than answers. Keywords COVID-19 · Employment · Unemployment · Data quality Measuring the economy during COVID-19 has been fraught with both challenges and opportunities for U.S. statistical agencies, researchers, and new players—such as Homebase—to provide accurate and valuable low- and high-frequency economic data. The statistical agencies dealt with lower than normal response rates, delays in processing, adding new measures, questions about whether responses were being classified correctly, and whether seasonal adjustments were appropriate. Meanwhile, new players who had never before provided macroeconomic data released statistics. Unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, the time series is extremely limited—often beginning in January 2020— which means the value of the data cannot be assessed. At this point, it is too early to know if any of these statistics reflect economic realities. We will only know over the next several years when the full extent of the recession and recovery is correctly measured based on full tax and unemployment insurance data. Given the host of data additions from the public and private sectors as well as academia, this paper focuses on regularly released statistics that are constructed to provide timely Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1057/s11369-020-00190-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Gerald D. Cohen [email protected] 1
Haver Analytics, New York, USA
insight into the monthly employment report, and issues related to that report itself.1 This paper is organized as follows. First, it analyzes the impact of COVID on traditional labor market statistics: jobless claims and the employment report. Second, it studies the newly developed Household Pulse Survey, Dallas Fed Real-Time Employment Survey, and Homebase timesheet tracking data. The paper concludes by offering some caution about interpreting both traditional and new data sources.
1 Jobless Claims The March 19 jobless claims report likely provided the first hard data illustrating the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. labor market. At that time, jobless claims increased 70,000 to what now seems a mere 281,000. This was the highest level of claims since September 2017. At the top of the release (https://oui.doleta.gov/press/2020/031
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