Furloughing

Abigail Adams-Prassl, Christopher Rauh, Teodora Boneva and Marta Golin

No 15194, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Over 9 million jobs were furloughed in the UK during the Coronavirus pandemic. Using real time survey evidence from the UK in April and May, we document which workers were most likely to be furloughed and analyze variation in the terms on which they furloughed. We find that women were significantly more likely to be furloughed. Inequality in care responsibilities seem to have played a key role: mothers were 10 percentage points more likely than fathers to initiate the decision to be furloughed (as opposed to it being fully or mostly the employer's decision) but we find no such gender gap amongst childless workers. The prohibition of working whilst furloughed was routinely ignored, especially by men who can do a large percentage of their work tasks from home. Women were less likely to have their salary topped up beyond the 80% subsidy paid for by the government. Considering the future, furloughed workers without employer-provided sick pay have a lower willingness to pay to return to work, as do those in sales and food preparation occupations. Compared to non-furloughed employees, furloughed workers are more pessimistic about keeping their job in the short to medium run and are more likely to be actively searching for a new job even when controlling for detailed job characteristics. These results have important implications for the design of short-time work schemes and the strategy for effectively reopening the economy.

Keywords: Covid-19; Coronavirus; Crisis; Recession; Short-time work; Furlough; Inequality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J21 J22 J24 J33 J63 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15194 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Working Paper: Furloughing (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:15194

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP15194

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().