Figure 5:

Recent Unemployment Rate in May by Occupation Index for Remote Work and Face-to-Face

Note: Sample consists of May CPS 2020 respondents age 18–65 years in the labor force. We produce the figure using the sample of observations in the regression on column (3) of Table 1, our most detailed model, for the month considered. We compute the average percent recently unemployed in each occupation and plot that against the occupation’s index value. Each occupational index has been standardized to have mean 0 and standard deviation 1. Each bubble represents a Census occupation, with area proportional to the size of the workforce that holds that occupation in our sample. To improve readability, when plotting the bubbles we excluded from the sample the 2 occupations that, in April 2020, have recent unemployment rate above 78%. However, to reproduce the line plotting the linear prediction of recently unemployed on each occupation index we do not drop these “extreme” occupations. The slope of the regression line in the left panel is −0.052 (constant=0.116), while the slope in the right panel is 0.023 (constant=0.119)