Economist Adam Blandin is a co-creator of the Real-Time Population Survey. (Photo by Ash Daniel)
Economist Adam Blandin has been tracking COVID-19 pandemic numbers since March, but not the ones you’re thinking of.
Blandin, a Virginia Commonwealth University assistant professor of economics, worked with Alex Bick of Arizona State University to develop an online economic survey centered on pandemic unemployment trends. It’s called the Real-Time Population Survey. Blandin says it was created as a tool to provide up-to-date data that was unavailable from larger federal government surveys.
“We were both macroeconomists and labor economists and wondered, ‘Is there something we can work on that in some small way can contribute to trying to solve this problem related to the pandemic?’ ” Blandin says. “The typical government survey is high quality and for the most part reliable, but the government survey was coming out once a month, and the data was roughly between one and two months old on the day it came out because it took several weeks to build the data.”
This prompted Blandin and his research team to replicate and expand the existing government survey to be more robust, useful and frequent. “We wanted to provide more timely and more frequent information,” he says. “And because it was just a two-man operation with some good help from some research assistants, we could publish the results in a few days instead of several weeks. And so we were able to put out two labor market reports before we’d heard anything from the government survey.”
The Real-Time Population Survey covers a gamut of socioeconomic variables, including unemployment numbers and factors, job mobility and vocational changes, and the impact of ethnicity, gender and educational disparities on employment.
One indicator on their survey not found on the federal government survey is data that pertains to people working from home. Blandin used a combination of targeted questioning and commuter data garnered from GPS information supplied by Google.
The Real Time Population Survey tracks the unemployment rate through the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You see striking disparities in who is working from home,” he says. “For example, in May, half of the people with a college degree worked from home versus only 15% of people with a high school degree or less [who did not]. And so, if you think about who’s most exposed to the pandemic, that’s pointing towards a higher risk for lower-education people who weren’t able to work from home as much.”
There has been a shift in women’s role in the workforce as well, with the effects of COVID-19, virtual learning by the public school system, and the dilemma of balancing work and family. “The female labor-force participation rate has dropped more for women than for men, and so you could see career implications of that down the road that haven’t manifested themselves yet,” Blandin says. “Women with kids are working from home at pretty high rates. Men have gone back to the office, on average.”
The data also shows that people with advanced education or four-year degrees experienced fewer instances of job loss, and high-income earners also kept their jobs. “If you were earning, say, $100,000 or more before the pandemic hit, it was very unlikely that you lost your job,” Blandin says. “If you were earning $50,000 or less, it was much more likely that you lost your job. And you see a large number of people having received earnings cuts. We see that many people who were temporarily laid off and then who were recalled back to their jobs. Those people [receiving lower wages] are especially likely to be called back.”
Ethnically, whites outpaced Black and Hispanic populations in employment, and vocationally, retail, recreation and fast food/hospitality workers took the largest hits. Blandin notes that more than a third of food and hospitality workers lost their jobs.
With all the data he collects, how does Blandin see an economic recovery?
“If you think about what’s the best possible scenario, the economy has recovered from large recessions very quickly in the past,” he says. “So one example is the 1980-1981 recession. During that recession, the unemployment rate shot up to above 10%, and it returned to normal within a year or so. So under certain circumstances, the economy can recover very quickly.
“Now I think we all know the headline numbers — the unemployment rate shot up to officially 14% in April. Unofficially, it was probably closer to 19%, and those numbers are higher than at any point since the Great Depression. And what’s most striking is that it all happened essentially in one month. Since then, there’s been a partial recovery, and so a good chunk of the work has been done.”
While the economy has regained some of its footing, a full recovery is not at hand. “I’ll just say that [in] November, the data was pretty worrying,” Blandin says. “The work-from-home rate went up again, employment stayed almost totally flat. And the virus cases were growing quickly. That’s a worrying trend that if that continues, then we’re kind of half or two-thirds of the way recovered. If we stay there for a long time, that could be really damaging.
“And if the virus is still very widespread, and people are afraid to go to restaurants and go to businesses and people aren’t able to work in the office, you could see us stalling out.”
