EconomiA最新文献

The main objective of this paper is to seek an explanation for the gap between the estimated remote work potential for Brazil and the remote work observed in the country. For this, at first, the teleworking potential is estimated based on the methodology of Dingel and Neiman (2020) applied to the Brazilian PNAD Contínua research based on the period prior to the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the research’s second stage, this potential is compared with remote work measurement provided by the PNAD Covid-19 survey, which was carried out between May and November 2020. A potential and effective telework gap was found, and we sought to investigate its causes based on the first PNAD Contínua interviews conducted in 2019, which contains information on people's domicile. The results indicate that about a fifth of workers in occupations that can be performed remotely live in households without the necessary means to be in a home office, such as a computer with internet access or even continuous electricity. Thereby, the potential for remote work was refined considering the socioeconomic characteristics of the workers, via the characteristics of the households present in the PNAD Contínua survey, which resulted in a refinement in the initial estimate of the potential for remote work initially carried out here went from 22.7% to 16.7%, significantly closer to that observed in May 2020, whose percentage was 13.3%.

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, swept through the United States. The necessary but costly non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) including social distancing, stay-at-home orders, and the closing or restriction of most businesses greatly increased the unemployment rate, and put millions of Americans at risk for eviction and bankruptcy. As a part of the relief efforts to mitigate the economic consequences of the shutdown orders, the United States Congress passed The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, also known as the CARES Act, which created the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP). The PPP, administered by the Small Business Administration (SBA), was intended to help small business keep employees on their payroll through loans guaranteed by the SBA that are forgivable if certain conditions are met. This paper, using publicly available data released by the SBA of loans worth $150,000 or greater, analyzes the effectiveness of the program through multiple avenues. On the overall effectiveness of the program, we explore the types of business that received PPP funding, the ranges of loan amounts provided, the types of banks that processed the loans, the cost-effectiveness of jobs saved based on the loan range, and the racial distribution of loan recipients. We also analyze the geographical distribution of loans based on congressional district to look at the influence race and political party had on how much PPP funding each congressional district received. Finally, we look at the how the PPP fit into the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by looking at the number of COVID-19 cases in each state at the time the program was initially closed, the amount of PPP funding for each state and analyzing the relationship between the loan amount per COVID-19 case and the date of reopening in each state, the relationship between the number of PPP loans received, and how long it took until a state reopened. We note that states that received more loans tended to delay their reopening, as a result, one of the main goals of the PPP, limiting the spread of COVID-19 by keeping people at home, was successful in that regard. We determine that the program, while a critical lifeline in a desperate, unprecedented time, had flaws in its deployment related to a lack of preparedness, a lack of equity in which recipients had initial access and how much funding recipients received, and noticeable gaps in the data. Finally, we recommend policy solutions and fixes going forward to bolster our preparedness response at the state and federal level and ensure that going forward, we can do better to meet the missed marks during the acute phase of the coronavirus pandemic.

This paper sets out to analyze gender behavior in the Brazilian labor market as a result of the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on job destruction and creation during the lockdown and implementation of social distancing throughout 2020. To do so, it uses the New General Register of Employed and Unemployed (NCAGED) and applies the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition to net male and female job destruction at municipal level, in the 18 to 40 age group. In addition, inequality for every month of 2020, in terms of the pre- and post-pandemic context was verified. It was found that the initial months affected all formal workers but had an even greater effect on women. Another relevant contribution of this study is its inequality decomposition, where the findings show that it is largely due to structural effects.

The COVID-19 pandemic has produced a global health and economic crisis. The entire world has faced a trade-off between health and recessionary effects. This paper investigates this trade-off according to a macro-dynamic perspective. We set up and simulate a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model to analyze the COVID-19 contagion within an economy with endogenous dynamics for the pandemic, variable labor utilization, and four lockdown policies with different degrees of size and duration. There are three main results in this study. First, the model matches rather well with the main European economies’ preliminary stylized facts during the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, a temporary lockdown policy reduces the epidemic’s size but exacerbates the recession’s severity. The negative peak in aggregate production ranges from 10% with a soft containment measure to 25% with a strong containment measure; second, recovery from recession emerges when the lockdown policy is relaxed. On that basis, the output return to its pre-lockdown level after about 50 weeks. Third, sectors characterized by flexible and capital-intensive technology suffer a more severe slowdown.

The new Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19), which began in late 2019 in China, lead to a health and economic crisis of significant proportions. The decrease in economic activity in order to prevent further spread of the disease affected all economic sectors, resulting in the unprecedented loss of jobs and the weakening of the informal economy. The Emergency Aid (EA) was created with the purpose of guaranteeing a subsistence income, minimizing the economic problems brought about by the pandemic. The aim of this paper is to analyze the direct and indirect impacts of the EA income transfers on the economy of Brazilian states. Of particular interest is to assess the distribution of indirect impacts as there may be spillovers of income between regions because of inter-sector relations and production chains. Thus, given the differences in production structures, the accounting of indirect impacts can result in a structure of regional distribution of benefits that is quite different from the initial one. The aim of this study is to assess which regions are relatively more benefited by comparing the initial structure of the distribution of the EA benefits with the final structure, after accounting for the spillovers. To do so, an interregional input-output model developed by Haddad et al. (2017) and data from the Brazilian Transparency Portal (Portal da Transparência) on resources allocated by the EA in the period from April to August 2020 were used. The results show that the states that benefited most in the initial distribution of the EA are the relatively most populous and poorest (Northeast) and the most benefited in the final distribution are those with more complex and relatively more developed productive structures (Southeast and South).