The speed and geographic variation of the COVID-19 economic decline has placed a premium on higher-frequency information, and on more disaggregate data on economic activity in different locations, than most economic surveys provide. Raj Chetty, John Friedman, Nathan Hendren, Michael Stepner, and the Opportunity Insights Team have combined information from a range of private-sector sources to develop daily, location-specific measures of economic activity (27431). They find that low-wage workers were more likely to become unemployed as a result of the pandemic, that spending by low-income households has rebounded faster than that of their high-income counterparts, and that the Payroll Protection Program had only a modest impact on employment. Chetty summarizes these findings in the short video above. A collection of pandemic-related videos may be found here.

Six NBER working papers distributed this week examine various economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic or analyze policy responses to it. One study analyzes the potential impact of the pandemic on long-term economic growth of different nations and regions (27855). Another assesses how COVID-19 may affect the demand for social safety nets, again disaggregating across countries (27865). Two studies examine issues that involve the stock market: one studies the performance of retail investors, a group of equity market participants who some analysts believe has played an important role in stock market movements since the outbreak of COVID-19 (27866), while the other considers the factors that are associated with high, and low, firm-level equity returns since COVID-19 struck (27867). A fifth study examines the response of consumer spending to the pandemic (27876), while a sixth explores the effect on the failure rate of small and medium-sized enterprises in many nations (27877).

More than 250 NBER working papers have presented pandemic-related research. These papers are open access and have been collected for easy reference. Like all NBER papers, they are circulated for discussion and comment, and have not been peer-reviewed. View them in reverse chronological order or by topic area.