More resilient small U.S. restaurants and their workers can exit the coronavirus recession and sustain an equitable economic recovery
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Overview There is an obviously urgent and irrefutable need for social distancing today across the breadth of the United States during the new coronavirus pandemic. The sacrifices necessary amid this public health emergency, however, impact some workers and their families and business owners and thei…
New congressional reports underscore structural inequalities driving U.S. racial disparities in coronavirus infections and COVID-19 deaths
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Two recently released reports by the Joint Economic Committee and the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee echo the disturbing media reports that Americans of color, particularly African Americans, are disproportionately contracting and dying of COVID-19, the disease spread by the new coro…
Why workers are engaging in collective action across the United States in response to the coronavirus crisis
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Overview Recent worker uprisings across the United States in reaction to unsafe working conditions in factories, warehouses, and stores amid the coronavirus pandemic are drawing new and timely attention to the inadequate labor standards endured by many in the U.S. labor force. This decline in standa…
Fool Me Once: Investing in Unemployment Insurance systems to avoid the mistakes of the Great Recession during COVID-19
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Overview Thousands of laid-off workers in Massachusetts unable to access the state’s Unemployment Insurance website. Kentucky, North Carolina, and Ohio experiencing full system outages. Nevada Unemployment Insurance applicants stuck at busy signals and hold messages. A civil engineer in Florida stum…
The coronavirus recession is severe, and the damage to the U.S. economy will last years
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I shared my views on the coronavirus recession on March 24, at a virtual conference that economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California, Berkeley organized. My remarks drew on my experience as a forecaster at the Federal Reserve Board during the Great Recession and its s…
Good U.S. fiscal policy could have made us stronger before the coronavirus recession and can make us stronger afterward
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When U.S. policymakers seek to restore the U.S. economy in the wake of the coronavirus recession, what will constitute success? Returning the economy to its prepandemic state is not sufficient. It’s not even desirable. Yes, unemployment was low, and job growth was strong. But that economy was also c…
Where should the marginal dollar go in U.S. fiscal policy—to testing or to the safety net—amid a pandemic-induced economic downturn?
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In our recent working paper, “An SEIR Infectious Disease Model with Testing and Conditional Quarantine,” the two of us and Simon Mongey, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago, explored the role of widespread coronavirus testing programs and argued that testing greatly alte…
Early lessons learned from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s first round of lending from its Paycheck Protection Program
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Overview Underscoring the direness of the coronavirus recession, Congress just reached an agreement to provide another $380 billion in rescue funding for small businesses, just one month after the passage of the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. The small business loa…
Three important questions to answer about global financial stabilization policies amid the coronavirus recession
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On March 24, my colleagues Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman at the University of California, Berkeley asked me to present to a teleconference of about 100 economists and other experts on the coronavirus recession from an international perspective—particularly the situation in the European economies…
The coronavirus pandemic highlights the importance of disaggregating U.S. data by race and ethnicity
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“We are all in this together” has been the refrain over the past four weeks, but it is far from the reality. Some of us still have jobs, while millions do not. Others are working on the front line of the coronavirus pandemic, exposing themselves to serious risk of illness and death. Others have unde…