Supplemental Material for The COVID-19 Pandemic and New Hire Engagement: Relationships With Unemployment Rates, State Restrictions, and Organizational Tenure

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) in the United States face problems of discrimination, the glass ceiling, and very high long-term unemployment rates. As a diverse population, although some Asian Americans are more successful than average, others, like those from Southeast Asia and Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs), work in low-paying jobs and suffer from high poverty rates, high unemployment rates, and low earnings. Collecting more detailed and additional data from employers, oversampling AAPIs in current data sets, making administrative data available to researchers, providing more resources for research on AAPIs, and enforcing nondiscrimination laws and affirmative action mandates would assist this population.

Introduction: Previous studies have found an increase in the incidence rate of depression between 2007 – 2013 in Portugal, with a positive correlation with the unemployment rate, namely, in men. So, it was hypothesized that this increase is related with the situation of economic crisis. This study aimed to investigate if the correlation between unemployment rates and the incidence of depression is maintained in the post-crisis period of economic recovery in Portugal (2016 – 2018).Material and Methods: An ecological study was carried out, using data from the General Practitioners Sentinel Network concerning depression incidence (first episodes and relapses) and data from the National Statistics Institute on unemployment rates in the Portuguese population. The correlation coefficient was estimated using linear regression and the results were disaggregated by sex.Results: Between 2016 and 2018, there was a consistent decrease in the incidence of depression in both sexes. During the 1995 – 2018 period, a positive correlation was observed between unemployment and depression, with a coefficient of 0.833 (p = 0.005) in males and of 0.742 (p = 0.022) in females.Discussion: The reduction in the incidence of depression in both sexes observed between 2016 – 2018 corroborates a positive correlation between unemployment and depression in the Portuguese population, previously observed between 2007 – 2013.Conclusion: This study highlights the need to monitor the occurrence of mental illness in the Portuguese population, especially in moments of greatest social vulnerability in order to establish preventive measures, as a way to mitigate the impact of future economic crises.

This paper explores the role of employment protection when powerful external crises reduce demand for products. We first present a theoretical framework that shows that employment protection has a U-shaped effect on abnormal unemployment during a negative exogenous shock to an economy. Using data from the 33 OECD countries, we analyze how the level of employment protection affected the stability of unemployment rates during the recent global economic crisis. The results suggest that countries with an intermediate level of employment protection will have more stable unemployment rates during a world crisis. The policy implication of our paper is that countries should seek a medium level of employment protection that may act as an automatic stabilizer of the economy on the macro level.

The purpose of the study is to conduct a statistical analysis and to perform a quantitative assessment of the degree and the dynamics of the interregional differences in youth unemployment in Russia between 2005 and 2013. We decompose the interregional differentiation into “within-group” and “between-group” differences. We also analyse the dynamics of the within-group and between-group differences and estimate their contribution to changes in the interregional differentiation of youth unemployment. Additionally, we estimate the degree and the dynamics of the interregional differences of the youth labour market in Russia in times of crisis and recovery growth. The results show a reduction in the interregional differences in unemployment rates between 2005 and 2008, while in 2009–2013, the interregional differentiation of the labour market increased. We found that the socio-economic effects of youth unemployment, as well as the behavioural response to economic shocks in the age groups of 15–19 and 20–29 years were significantly different.

Southern states have used a variety of methods to disenfranchise African American voters. Empirical data on the effectiveness of these measures is rare. We present a unique data source from Louisiana that allows us to empirically document voter registration rates from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Using basic time series data, we document how voter registration rates changed over time in response to state restrictions. We then conduct a second analysis, which focuses on Louisiana’s use of the Understanding Clause to reduce voter registration among Blacks. We show that in parishes that used the Understanding Clause, Black registration rates dropped by nearly 30 percentage points, with little effect on white registration. The findings of this paper have important implications for understanding the potential for discrimination in the enforcement of modern, ostensibly nonracial, voter eligibility requirements, such as voter ID laws, which grant substantial discretion to local officials in determining voter eligibility.