Measuring employment during COVID-19: challenges and opportunities

Abstract

Measuring the economy during COVID-19 has created a set of hurdles and prospects for the U.S. statistical agencies, the private sector, and academia. This included how to deal with unprecedented movements in economic variables while ensuring data quality. At the same time, new entrants released data that are sometimes at odds with gold standard releases. Given the multitude of data, this article focuses on both existing and new ways to track the employment statistics. The results leave more questions than answers.