COVID-19 and labour market resilience: evidence from large-scale recruitment behaviour

ABSTRACT

We construct a theoretical model to interpret the structural shock from the COVID-19 pandemic and the response of local labour market and industry specialization. The empirical study takes the large-scale online labour market of China to analyse firms’ hiring demand for 20 industries across 380 cities with monthly recruitment data from May 2017 to September 2020. Post-event quantitative analysis on job postings and employer demand highlighted that the pandemic resulted in an unemployment shock and industry- and city-level redistribution of the worker. China’s local job market resilience also revealed a regional imbalance, correlated with pandemic risk, city scale and industry structure.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• local labour market
• resilience
• online recruitment behaviour

JEL:

• E24
• J3
• O18

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Xinguo Yu and Hengxu Song contributed equally to this article.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.