The stay-at-home labor market: Google searches, unemployment insurance, and public health orders

Abstract

In this Chicago Fed Letter, we explore the relationships between daily Google searches for unemployment-related subjects, weekly initial unemployment insurance claims, and public health orders (stay-at-home, shelter-in-place, and nonessential business closure orders) imposed by U.S. state and local governments in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. To take one oft-cited example, according to OpenTable, online reservations for restaurants in its network have ceased completely in many large cities that are under stay-at-home orders.3 Moreover, Homebase-an online scheduling and time-tracking firm that serves numerous small businesses-reports that almost 50% of their clients have closed since January of this year and that the hours worked by hourly employees of their clients is down by almost 60%.4 Many service industry workers have been let go outright by their employers. indicating that initial claims came in well above the consensus forecast. [...]there is a small subset of mostly rural states that have not taken statewide or significant local action.9 Somewhat surprisingly, stay-at-home, shelter-in-place, and nonessential business closure orders appear not to have had direct effects either on Google search interest in unemployment and related subjects or on initial UI claims. The differences in the timing of public health order implementations largely matched the spread of the virus-states with earlier outbreaks of the virus (primarily those on the East and West Coasts) moved first, and states with later outbreaks (mostly those in the Midwest and the South) followed suit.