[go: up one dir, main page]

  EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Long Social Distancing

Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis

No 30568, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Many working-age Americans plan to continue some forms of social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. We uncover this long social distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. It is stronger among older persons, the less educated, and those who live with or care for persons at high risk from infectious diseases. Regression models fit to individual-level data suggest that social distancing lowered labor force participation by 2.4 percentage points in 2022, 1.2 points on an earnings-weighted basis. These effects are highly concentrated among persons with long COVID experiences or daily interactions with at-risk persons. When combined with simple equilibrium models, our results imply that the participation drag reduced U.S. output by $205 billion in 2022, shrank the college wage premium by 2.1 percentage points, and modestly steepened the cross-sectional age-wage profile. The social-distancing drag on participation diminished by an estimated 1.6 percentage points from February 2022 to April 2023. Drawing on self-assessed causal effects in a separate analysis, infection worries lowered participation by an estimated one percentage point as of late 2022.

JEL-codes: D12 E24 J14 J21 J22 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
Note: EFG LS
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Jose Maria Barrero & Nicholas Bloom & Steven J. Davis, 2023. "Long Social Distancing," Journal of Labor Economics, vol 41(S1), pages S129-S172.
Published as Long Social Distancing , José Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis. in Wage Dynamics in the 21st Century , Hurst and Kahn. 2023

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30568.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Long Social Distancing (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Long social distancing (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Long social distancing (2023) Downloads
Working Paper: Long social distancing (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Long Social Distancing (2022) Downloads
Working Paper: Long Social Distancing (2022) Downloads
Chapter: Long Social Distancing (2021)
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:30568

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30568

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 ().

 
Page updated 2024-12-21
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30568