While female labor force participation (LFP) in Iran is among the lowest in the world, there is hardly any study on the COVID-19 pandemic effects on the country's female LFP. We find that female LFP decreased during the pandemic years by around 1 percentage point in 2021 and 2022. When...

We use a repeated large-scale survey of households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. We document several facts. First, job loss has been significantly larger than implied by new unemployment claims: we estimate 20 million...

This study is the first in the world to investigate the expected impact of the COVID-19 crisis on career outcomes and career aspirations. To this end, high-quality survey research with a relevant panel of Belgian employees was conducted. About 21% of them fear losing their jobs due to the...

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households' spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth...

This paper studies the determinants of firms' business outlook and managerial mitigation strategies in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis using a representative panel of German firms. We first demonstrate that the crisis amplifies pre-crisis weaknesses: Firms that appear relatively weak before the...

COVID-19 substantially decreased employment, but the effects vary among demographic and socioeconomic groups. We document the employment losses in April 2020 across various groups using the U.S. Current Population Survey. The unemployment rate understates employment losses. We focus on the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. economy and labor market. We assess the initial spike in unemployment due to the virus response and possible paths for the official unemployment rate through 2021. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the path for measured unemployment, depending on the...

Food production and distribution is essential for human well-being, but the food sector has experienced a number of difficulties maintaining worker health and productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examine employment status changes of persons recently employed in the U.S. food sector with...

The goal of this piece is to survey the emerging and rapidly growing literature on the economic consequences of COVID-19 and government response, and to synthetize the insights emerging from a very large number of studies. This survey (i) provides an overview of the data sets used to measure...