Brian Bell, Nicholas Bloom, Jack Blundell, and Luigi Pistaferri
The COVID-19 pandemic is turning into a global recession – probably the biggest drop in economic activity since the Great Depression of the 1930s. This column uses over 3 million earnings observations drawn from more than 400,000 UK workers between 1975 and 2016 to identify groups of workers who are most exposed to aggregate risk. This findings suggest that young male workers at small firms could see earnings losses of 8% to 9%, with older women at large firms seeing little or no change in their earnings.
