Employer and Employee Behaviors, Experiences, and Perceptions of the COVID-19 Pandemic

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AbstractMore than a year after its discovery, COVID-19 continues to have a profound effect on our society. Its impacts extend far beyond the direct physical health effects: the consequences of school and work closures affect labor supply and demand, financial health, mental health, and the global economy. Even as vaccines have become available, economic recovery is likely to be uneven, with larger impacts among those who are already financially and psychologically vulnerable, including working parents and service sector workers who already bear the greatest burden of unstable employment and low wages. This project will collect new data on the experiences of working Americans for the period 2021 - mid-2022 to shed light on what factors are associated with the economic and mental health outcomes in the later stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of the proposed data collection is to trace the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and differential policy responses on mental health and labor market outcomes in order to enhance the understanding of the links between employment, working conditions, financial well-being, and mental health. The project is aimed to collect longitudinal survey data in the RAND American Life Panel (ALP), a nationally representative, probability-based panel of U.S. adult participants who are regularly interviewed over the internet. The proposed data collection will enable analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and policy response by industry, occupation, and location on individuals’ employment, earnings, and productivity, as well as their financial well-being and mental health. Standard surveys do not capture sufficient information about employers’ accommodations, employees’ adaptive behaviors, or individual-level links between employment outcomes, financial well-being, and psychological distress to address these questions. The proposed data collection will build on prior NSF-funded surveys examining American workers’ experiences during the first year and a half of the pandemic. Moreover, the proposed data collection will build on prior work examining a comprehensive set of American working conditions prior to the pandemic using data that are harmonized to a large, long-running survey of working conditions in Europe that continued into the pandemic.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.