US AND UK LABOUR MARKETS BEFORE AND DURING THE COVID-19 CRASH
Open accessAbstract
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.
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The decision to lockdown the country negatively impacted the employment market.
“The decision to ‘lockdown’ the country also negatively impacted the employment market (Bell & Blanchflower, 2020)”
From Living through lockdown: A qualitative exploration of individuals' experiences in the UK. (2022) · cites this paper as Bell & Blanchflower, 2020
The available passage (indexed under “38 Field Citation Ratio,” no page given) reports lost income during the COVID-19 crisis and sharply increased unemployment. It supports a negative labour-market impact, but does not attribute that impact specifically to a decision to impose lockdown. (LLM, conf=0.78)
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References 19 · Cited by 136
- Authors
- Bell, D. N. F., & Blanchflower, D. G.
- Affiliations
- University of Stirling (GB)
- Dartmouth College (US)
- Venue
- National Institute Economic Review
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2020-04-28
- Volume
- 252
- Pages
- R52-R69
- ISSN
- 0027-9501 (ISSN-L)
- 1741-3036
- OpenAlex
- W3018065504
- Cited by
- 136
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 23 · 2022: 33 · 2021: 37 · 2020: 24
- FWCI
- 24.86
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- hdl.handle.net
- Licence
- cc-by-nc-nd
- www.cambridge.org/core/terms (unspecified)
- Locations
- National Institute Economic Review (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Stirling Online Research Repository (University of Stirling) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- Economic and Social Research Council (ES/R009139/1)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › COVID-19 Pandemic Impacts
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Labor market dynamics and wage inequality
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Unemployment and Economic Growth
- Keywords
- COVID-19 pandemic, labor market, unemployment, unemployment insurance claims, job loss, income loss, distributional effects, remote work, young workers, educational attainment, racial minorities, job placement, Great Recession comparison, United States labor market, UK labour market
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