Abstract
As the COVID pandemic outbreak first impacted the world in Dec. 2019, the US responded immediately with individual and municipal level actions to contain the negative impacts of the disease. However, the US economy still experienced great losses in many aspects, ranging from decreased GDP[1], tightened labor market[2], business failures[3], to high inflation[4]. In particular, the government-mandated lockdowns have resulted in a significant increase in unemployment status and a decrease in labor force participation in the US. Unlike the regular recession where we observe a decrease in the males' unemployment rate and labor force participation rate, this COVID-induced recession was rather a severe “shecession” where females were more prone to losing their jobs and being forced out of the labor force[5]. In this paper, I study the correlation between the county-level COVID case counts and the female labor force participation rate. By using the fixed effects model, I examine the correlations between COVID case count and the female labor force participation and unemployment rate. In this study, I found that female labor force participation and employment status are not associated with the change in the COVID case count on a county month level.
[1] The White House. 2022a. “The U.S. Economy and the Global Pandemic.” The White House. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Chapter-3-new.pdf.
[2] Edwards Daniel, Roxanna; Essien, Lawrence S. ;Levinstein,Michael. 2022. “U.S. Labor Market Shows Improvement in 2021, but the COVID-19 Pandemic Continues to Weigh on the Economy: Monthly Labor Review: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.” Www.bls.gov. June 2022. https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2022/article/us-labor-market-shows-improvement-in-2021-but-the-covid-19-pandemic-continues-to-weigh-on-the-economy.htm#:~:text=The%20recession%20induced%20by%20the.
[3] Alexander W. Bartik, Marianne Bertrand, Zoe Cullen, Edward L. Glaeser, Michael Luca, and Christopher Stanton. 2020a. “The Impact of COVID-19 on Small Business Outcomes and Expectations.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 117 (30). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2006991117.
[4] Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prachi Mishra. 2022. “Understanding US Inflation during the COVID Era.” Brookings. Brookings. September 8, 2022. https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/understanding-u-s-inflation-during-the-covid-era/.
[5] Alon, Titan, Sena Coskun, Matthias Doepke, David Koll, and Michèle Tertilt. 2021b. “From Mancession to Shecession: Women’s Employment in Regular and Pandemic Recessions.” SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3813650.