Corporate Hiring under COVID-19: Labor Market Concentration, Downskilling, and Income Inequality

Murillo Campello, Gaurav Kankanhalli and Pradeep Muthukrishnan

No 27208, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Big data on job-vacancy postings reveal several dimensions of the impact of COVID-19 on the U.S. job market. Firms have cut back on postings for high-skill jobs more than for low-skill jobs, with small firms nearly halting their new hiring altogether. New-hiring cuts and downskilling are most pronounced in local labor markets lacking depth (where employment is concentrated within a few firms), in low-income areas, and in areas with greater income inequality. Cuts are deeper in industries where workers are more unionized and in the non-tradable sector. Access to finance modulates corporate hiring, with credit-constrained firms curtailing their job postings the most. Our study shows how the early-2020 global pandemic is shaping the dynamics of hiring, identifying the firms, jobs, places, industries, and labor markets most affected by it. Our results point to important challenges to the scale and speed of a recovery.

JEL-codes: E24 G31 J23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma and nep-mac
Note: CF LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (55)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27208.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:27208

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w27208

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().