Near term forecasts, also called nowcasts, are most challenging but also most important when the economy experiences an abrupt change. In this paper, we explore the performance of models with different information sets and data structures in order to best nowcast US initial unemployment claims...

This paper studies whether labor market mismatch played an important role for labor market dynamics during the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply the framework of S¸ahin et al. (2014) to the US and the UK to measure misallocation between job seekers and vacancies across sectors until the third quarter...

We ask whether sectoral shocks and the subsequent labor reallocation are responsible for unemployment within selected European economies. Our measure of sectoral labor reallocation is adjusted for aggregate influences and the remaining variation is linked to unemployment in country specific...

This paper examines the response of the U.S. labor market to a large and persistent job separation rate shock, motivated by the ongoing economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use nonlinear methods to analytically and numerically characterize the responses of vacancy creation and...

Up-to-date, nationally representative household income/expenditure data are crucial to estimating poverty during the COVID-19 pandemic and to policy-making more broadly, but South Africa lacks such data. We present new pandemic poverty estimates, simulating incomes in prepandemic household...

The aim of this paper is to determine how wage inequality is likely to be affected by the current COVID-19 pandemic. I first estimate the impact that social distancing will have on US state-level employment using pre-crisis industry data. I then consider the joint impact of states' unemployment...

The online activity of Internet users has repeatedly been shown to provide a rich information set for various research fields. We focus on job-related searches on Google and their possible usefulness in the region of the Visegrad Group - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Even for...

The aim of the paper is to analyze the ability of internet activity, what has been called Google econometrics, to predict unemployment in Spain. We include a new predictor for Spanish unemployment based on internet information provided by Google Trends. Using monthly data from January 2004 to...

In this paper we study international linkages when forecasting unemployment rates in a sample of 24 OECD economies. We propose a Global Unemployment Factor (GUF) and test its predictive ability considering in-sample and out-of-sample exercises. Our main results indicate that the predictive...