Has the Willingness to Work Fallen during the Covid Pandemic?

We examine the effect of the Covid pandemic on willingness to work along both the extensive and intensive margins of labor supply. Special survey questions in the Job Search Supplement of the Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE) allow us to elicit information about individuals’ desired work hours for the 2013-2021 period. Using these questions, along with workers’ actual labor market participation, we construct a labor market underutilization measure, the Aggregate Hours Gap (AHG), following Faberman et al. (2020). The AHG captures changes in labor market underutilization for the full population along both the extensive and intensive margins using data on desired work hours as a measure of their potential labor supply. We find that a sharp increase in the AHG during the Covid pandemic essentially disappeared by the end of 2021. We also document a sharp decline in desired work hours during the pandemic that persists through the end of 2021 and is roughly double the drop in the labor force participation rate. Ignoring the decline in desired hours overstates the degree of underutilization by 2.5 percentage points (12.5%). Our findings suggest that, through 2021Q4, the labor market was tighter than suggested by the unemployment rate and the adverse labor supply effect of the pandemic was more pronounced than implied by the labor force participation rate. These discrepancies underscore the importance of taking into account the intensive margin for both labor market underutilization and potential labor supply.

Unemployment in the Time of COVID-19: A Flow-Based Approach to Real-time Unemployment Projections

This paper presents a flow-based methodology for real-time unemployment rate projections and shows that this approach performed considerably better at the onset of the COVID-19 recession in the spring 2020 in predicting the peak unemployment rate as well as its rapid decline over the year. It presents an alternative scenario analysis for 2021 based on this methodology and argues that the unemployment rate is likely to decline to 5.4 percent by the end of 2021. The predictive power of the methodology comes from its combined use of real-time data with the flow approach.

Maximum Employment and the Participation Cycle

We investigate the source, magnitude, and unevenness of the procyclical forces that shape labor force participation, i.e., the participation cycle, which are important for the implementation of the maximum employment mandate. We show that these forces can be analyzed in real time using a flow decomposition of the changes in the labor force participation rate. The decomposition reveals that the source of the participation cycle is fluctuations in job-loss and job-finding rates, rather than cyclical movements in labor force entry and exit rates. The magnitude of the participation cycle is large. Cyclical downward pressures on employment from participation are two-thirds that of unemployment. Moreover, the participation cycle delays the recovery in employment because it lags the unemployment cycle. It also amplifies the unevenness of the impact of recessions. Groups that see large increases in their unemployment rates also experience more pronounced participation cycles. Despite differences in their magnitudes, the source of the participation cycle is the same for all groups. Application of our method to the COVID-19 Recession suggests that, as of June 2021, the bulk of the drop in the participation rate since the onset of the pandemic is cyclical and that the cyclical recovery in participation likely will trail that of the unemployment rate.