How do industries recover through Covid-19 pandemic? An empirical investigation on Chinese online recruitment data

ABSTRACT

We investigate the recovery of domestic industries following the effective control of the COVID-19 pandemic in China, which has implications for future trends in global economic recovery. We employ online firm recruitment data from a major Chinese online job listing website to reflect the recovery in employment and a regression discontinuity design. The results show that after the COVID-19 pandemic was effectively controlled in China from March 2020, the Chinese economy in terms of employment experienced an overall V-shaped recovery. From an industry perspective, some industries underwent the same rapid recovery, whereas others exhibited a U-shaped recovery path. In addition, we found that industries in the information technology industry were not negatively affected by COVID-19 and continued to perform well during the domestic epidemic.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• economic recovery
• firm recruitment
• regression discontinuity design

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• H32
• J21
• J40

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ zhaopin.com & 58.com.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [42176217] and Key Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China [71933001].