US Employment Inequality in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 Pandemic

Steven Fazzari and Ella Needler
Additional contact information
Ella Needler: Washington University in St. Louis

No inetwp154, Working Papers Series from Institute for New Economic Thinking

Abstract: This article compares inequality in US employment across social groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop an inequality measure that captures both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of those declines. The results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job loss measure, less educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.

Keywords: Employment; Unemployment; Inequality; Great Recession; COVID-19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 J21 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 19 pages
Date: 2021-03-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

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https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3839026 First version, 2021 (text/html)

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Journal Article: US employment inequality in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp154

DOI: 10.36687/inetwp154

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