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

This paper investigates the role of job characteristics on an individual's decisions to self-isolate, work, and apply for unemployment insurance in the US 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 mobile devices leave their homes, or part-time or full-time at work that day, and we also collect data on weekly unemployment insurance claims. We find that the presence of jobs with high work-from-home capacity in a region increases the ability of people to self-isolate and decreases their unemployment risk, whereas the presence of jobs with high physical proximity decreases the incidences of self-isolation and unemployment and increases the incidence of work during the pandemic. These heterogeneous responses based on local job characteristics persist even conditional on a broad set of demographic and socioeconomic variables