Research
Research
“Has COVID disrupted the postsecondary pipeline?” Lauren Bauer, Veronica Clevenstine, Wendy Edelberg, Elisabeth Raczek and Winnie Yee. Up Front. The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. October 14, 2021.
Among young adults (ages 16-24), recovery from the COVID-19 recession has looked quite different from previous recessions and from the experiences of older Americans.
“Time Waited for No Mom in 2020” Lauren Bauer, Sara Estep, and Winnie Yee. Up Front. The Hamilton Project, Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C. July 22, 2021.
In 2020, mothers of younger children were primary and primarily caregivers. In this piece, we document declines in labor force participation among mothers and provide evidence of how mothers spent their time in between May and December 2020, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that overall, mothers of children 12 and under spent an average of 8.6 hours per day on direct and secondary child care activities. Restricting attention to employed mothers with children 12 and under also spent about 8.3 hours (8 hours during the weekday) per day on direct and indirect child care, and worked about 6.1 hours per weekday.
“Adjusting the Unemployment Thermometer” Regis Barnichon and Winnie Yee. FRBSF Economic Letter. September 3, 2020.
Stay-at-home orders issued to slow the spread of COVID-19 may have severely distorted labor market statistics, notably the official unemployment rate. A method to correct the survey biases associated with the pandemic indicates that the true unemployment rate was substantially higher than the official rate in April and May. However, the biases appeared to fade thereafter, making the drop in June even more dramatic than implied by the official data.
“Wringing the Overoptimism from FOMC Growth Forecasts” Kevin Lansing and Winnie Yee. FRBSF Economic Letter. February 10, 2020.
Growth forecasts by Federal Open Market Committee meeting participants were persistently too optimistic for 2008 through 2016. The typical forecast started out high but was revised down over time, often dramatically, as incoming data failed to meet expectations. In contrast, forecasts for 2017 through 2019 started low but were revised up over time. Cumulative forecast revisions for these years were much smaller on average than in the past. These observations suggest that participants have adjusted their forecast methodology, including lowering estimates of trend growth, to eliminate the prior optimistic bias.