新冠肺炎疫情对中国劳动力市场的影响——基于个体追踪调查的全面分析

The Impact of COVID-19 on the Chinese Labor Market——A Comprehensive Analysis Based on the Individual Tracking Survey

中国的新冠肺炎疫情防控取得了重大战略成果,为世界各国提供了宝贵经验。其中疫情防控对劳动力市场的影响及其复苏,特别值得深入讨论。本文利用2020年3月初到11月底对5600多名从业者的个体追踪数据,分析了疫情暴发期间中国劳动力市场遭受的冲击。研究发现,从业者复工率从3月初的63.1%提高到6月中旬的84.2%,截至11月底恢复到89.7%;从业者的失业率从6月中旬到11月底降低了60%,达到4.4%。疫情冲击下的就业趋势呈现"V"型特征,即尽管中国就业形势一度受到疫情的猛烈冲击,但随着疫情防控的有利开展,中国劳动力市场活力平稳恢复,就业趋势整体向好。此外,本文利用回归技术分析了"封城"等防控措施对复工进度的因果影响,进而对从业者心理健康的影响。分析发现,地区层面的疫情防控措施显著降低了从业者个体复工的可能性,复工不足会对从业者的心理健康产生显著的负向影响,而这一影响倾向于短期。本文的结论强调了应对短期的就业冲击,常态化疫情防控下应做好"稳就业"工作,尽量减弱对经济的负面影响;同时需尽快制定针对失业群体的帮扶政策,"保基本民生",减少贫困的发生。

After the COVID-19 outbreak,China has taken strict prevention and control measures,which have effectively contained the spread of the virus and brought significant health benefits.However,there is little discussion regarding the economic costs of these policies.Therefore,it is of great scientific and policy relevance to assess the impact of prevention and control measures on the labor market,as well as the health risks caused by unemployment.The core of our empirical analysis is the comprehensive tracking record of China’s WeChat users.We randomly selected more than 5600 WeChat users who were employed at the end of 2019 and tracked them throughout 2020.This employee dataset includes detailed information on working status,unemployed duration and earnings,which allows us to analyze the dynamic pattern of the impact of COVID-19 on the Chinese labor market.We began our analysis by describing the dynamic changes in work status for Chinese labor force over 2020.We found that the rate of work resumption increased from 63.1%in early March to 84.2%in mid-June and further climbed up to 89.7%by the end of November,while the unemployment rate fell from 11%in mid-June to 4.4%in November.The numbers show a"V"shaped pattern of the Chinese labor market.We then quantified the causal effect of lockdowns on working status by employing a difference-in-differences(DID)approach.The estimation results show that the city lockdown is negatively associated with the probability of work resumption.On average,lockdown policy reduces 13.2 percentage points of the likelihood of returning to work.Furthermore,our event study analysis verifies the assumption of the parallel trends among cities with and without lockdown policies.Therefore,the DID estimation indeed suggests a causal effect.We then shifted our focus towards the mental health impact of the inadequate employment due to lockdowns.With the 3-wave pooled cross-sectional data,our estimation results based on the individual fixed effect model show that job losses due to lockdowns may in general worsen the mental health status of Chinese labor force,especially the unemployed labor force.This adverse impact on mental health of labor force reaches the highest level in June and turns out to be insignificant in November,suggesting that there exists an optimistic expectation on employment recovery in the end of 2020 for those who were unemployment at that time.This paper makes several contributions to the COVID-19 literature.First,it contributes to the debate on the lockdown policies and their consequences in the labor market.Due to the data limitation,few exiting studies can carry out the causal analysis on the employment effect of lockdowns.This study uses the most up-to-date employee tracking data to address this issue and verifies that there is indeed a negative impact of lockdown polices on work resumption,which highlights the economic costs of public health policies.Second,this study contributes to the debate on the effects of job losses under economic recession on the mental health status of labor force.This study reveals that the negative impact on mental health status diminishes with the resurgent pace of economy.This implies that the short-term economic fallout is associated with an immediate psychological shock for discouraged workers,and no further effect can be detected once the economy recovers.Third,the data used in this study are not only newly collected individual-level data but also the only tracking data available in China for the plague year.It allows us to discover the issues in the Chinese labor market for the first time.The empirical evidence in China has rich implications for the ongoing global efforts in containing the spread of COVID-19.The following aspects are particularly emphasized:(1)for the short-term crisis in the labor market due to COVID-19,social protection measures should play an important role to mitigate the negative shocks of lockdown policies on the economy;(2)supporting policies for the unemployed labor force are urgently needed to reduce their risk of falling into poverty.