Unemployment in the Time of COVID-19: A Flow-Based Approach to Real-time Unemployment Projections / Ayşegül Şahin, Murat Tasci, Jin Yan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Şahin, Ayşegül.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Tasci, Murat.

Yan, Jin.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w28445.

NBER working paper series no. w28445

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2021.

Summary:

This paper presents a flow-based methodology for real-time unemployment rate projections and shows that this approach performed considerably better at the onset of the COVID-19 recession in the spring 2020 in predicting the peak unemployment rate as well as its rapid decline over the year. It presents an alternative scenario analysis for 2021 based on this methodology and argues that the unemployment rate is likely to decline to 5.4 percent by the end of 2021. The predictive power of the methodology comes from its combined use of real-time data with the flow approach.

Notes:

Print version record

February 2021.