Researcher ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0009-7659-8727

Graduation Year

2023

Date of Submission

4-2023

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Florian Madison

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2023 Carlos D Montelongo

Abstract

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, labor market outcomes in the United States drastically changed as the country entered its first recession since the Great Recession. The lives of millions of Americans became upended as economic shutdowns and lockdown orders spread across the United States. This paper attempts to quantify and examine the heterogeneity of employment trends before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic along the following four dimensions: race/ethnicity, gender, education, and age. By using cross-sectional data from the Current Population Survey, I gathered a representative sample of different demographic groups in the United States. My objective is to add to the literature by analyzing changes in the employment to population ratio for individual demographic groups through 2021 and 2022. I find that the impacts of COVID-19 on the employment outcomes of these groups varied, but there were many commonalities. While the demographic groups whose employment to population ratios were expected to experience the largest declines in the pandemic year of 2020 did see the largest reductions, many of them also exhibited rapid recoveries in 2021 and 2022. This paper reveals that some of the employment trends observed among the demographic groups may be the result of exogenous factors.

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