Pandemic Layoffs

At the onset of the pandemic, Professor Wolcott worked with co-author Marianna Kudlyak (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco) and Middlebury students  Lachlan Pinney ’21.5 and Claire Moy ’22 to assemble a dataset of high-frequency state-level layoff data from the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act.  Professor Wolcott will discuss the ways in which they used this data to document layoffs in the United States which were predominantly temporary as well as more recent work in which they study the effect of local stay-at-home orders in March-April 2020 on mass layoffs.  



Erin Wolcott joined the Middlebury Department of Economics as an Assistant Professor in the fall of 2017. Her research is in macroeconomics, labor economics, and international finance. She teaches courses on macroeconomics, globalization, and inequality.