Shelby R. Buckman’s research while affiliated with Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and other places

How much is inequity costing us? Using a simple growth accounting framework we apply standard shift-share techniques to data from the Current Population Survey (1990-2019) to compute the aggregate economic costs of persistent educational and labor market disparities by gender and race. We find significant economic losses associated with these gaps. Building on this finding, we consider which disparities generate the largest costs, paying specific attention to differences in employment, hours worked, educational attainment, educational utilization, and occupational allocation. We also examine gaps in the returns on these variables. Our findings suggest that differences in employment opportunities and educational attainment make the largest contributions by race; differences in returns on these variables also contribute materially to the total costs. Differences by gender are primarily driven by gaps in employment and hours. Given the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the labor market outcomes of women and people of color, as well as the fact that the U.S. population is increasingly racially diverse, these costs will only increase in the future.

We demonstrate a methodology for replicating and projecting the path of COVID-19 using a simple epidemiology model. We fit the model to daily data on the number of infected cases in China, Italy, the United States, and Brazil. These four countries can be viewed as representing different stages, from later to earlier, of a COVID-19 epidemic cycle. We solve for a model-implied effective reproduction number R t each day so that the model closely replicates the daily number of currently infected cases in each country. For out-of-sample projections, we fit a behavioral function to the in-sample data that allows for the endogenous response of R t to movements in the lagged number of infected cases. We show that declines in measures of population mobility tend to precede declines in the model-implied reproduction numbers for each country. This pattern suggests that mandatory and voluntary stay-at-home behavior and social distancing during the early stages of the epidemic worked to reduce the effective reproduction number and mitigate the spread of COVID-19.