Two years after the onset of the pandemic, the US unemployment rate had fallen back to near its pre-pandemic level. The recovery in the participation rate, by contrast, has been more sluggish, and labor shortages have been common. Is labor supply responding to improving economic conditions in the same way that it did during previous recoveries? Or have labor supply decisions fundamentally changed during the pandemic era? Some commentators claim that the pandemic forced Americans to rethink their decisions regarding work-life balance. Although claims of a "Great Resignation" may be exaggerated, many firms are now trying to accommodate workers' demands for more flexible working environments. This session will ask how the pandemic has affected worker attitudes and employment requirements—including remote-work availability. It will also assess the importance of these effects for labor supply in the years to come.

Remote work has exploded during the pandemic, and firms and workers are now sorting through the lessons from this experience. Has eliminating the daily commute and office distractions allowed employees to achieve work-life balance without reducing productivity? Or does remote work reduce the serendipitous meetings among employees that promote innovation? Is remote work good for older employees with many responsibilities in the home but bad for younger workers hoping to pick up new skills on the job? This panel discussion will explore what the data are beginning to say about the economy's experiment with remote work. It will also ask whether remote work will exacerbate long-standing inequalities among workers with different levels of skill and education.

Economists have traditionally applauded the automation of work due to its positive effect on labor productivity. But many researchers are now rethinking the effects of automation on overall incomes and on income inequality. Today, a critical question is how the new technologies encouraged by the COVID-19 pandemic (such as remote college teaching and touchscreen menus at restaurants) will affect the economy in the future. Will the widespread adoption of these technologies enhance labor productivity and thereby raise incomes broadly? Or will these technologies merely replace existing workers and potentially worsen income inequality? What evidence will help us evaluate the new technologies that the pandemic has encouraged? And what labor market policies should we consider in light of the potential effects of these technologies?

Retirements typically increase in economic downturns, and the COVID-19 recession was no exception. Unlike in previous recessions, however, retirements have been relatively insensitive to local economic conditions, raising the possibility that other factors—such as health concerns, generous unemployment insurance benefits, or the performance of the housing and stock markets—were particularly important for retirements during the pandemic. This session will review what we know about the relationship between macroeconomic performance and retirement probabilities. It will then take a broad look at how the pandemic has affected retirement decisions and what those effects imply for labor supply in the future.

Restrictions on entering the United States that were imposed during the pandemic caused the net inflow of immigrants to essentially cease. Estimates suggest that at the end of 2021, there were approximately 2 million fewer working-age immigrants living in the United States than there would have been if pre-pandemic trends had continued. Moreover, about half of these "missing migrants" would have been college educated. This session will address how the decline in immigration has impacted the industries and localities that have traditionally depended on new arrivals to the United States. Have the dramatic changes in international migration patterns affected where domestic residents are likely to move? Given previous research on the economic determinants and effects of migration, should we expect the shortfall in foreign-born residents to be made up as the economy recovers? If it isn't, what might be the consequences for the US labor force and wages?

As the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted economies across the globe, governments rushed support to both businesses and workers. Some policies focused on helping workers who had separated from their employers, while others tried to preserve worker-firm matches with temporary governmental assistance. An example of the latter is short-term compensation (STC). This type of work-sharing arrangement allows a firm to cut the hours of some of its workers, with a portion of these workers' lost wages replaced by government-provided insurance. This session will analyze the effects of STC during the pandemic in the US states that provided it. It will also compare these state-level results with those of national work-sharing arrangements that were common in other, mostly European countries.

The pandemic has featured a striking surge in applications for new businesses. This increase includes new businesses that are likely to hire workers as well as nonemployee firms, but the increase has been uneven across industries. The most affected industries are broadly consistent with the pandemic's effects on spending—with online retail and truck-transportation firms seeing especially large increases—but the overall surge in business formation is surprising given pre-pandemic declines in the pace of entrepreneurship and business dynamism in the United States. The causes and consequences of increasing business applications are not well understood, not only because this increase has been so recent, but also because of time lags in the release of official firm- and establishment-level data on job creation and destruction and on entry and exit. This session will draw on historical evidence as well as the latest available data to investigate the likely drivers and potential impact of the entrepreneurship surge.

Shifting patterns of labor demand have had significant effects on wage growth and wage inequality during the 21st century. By and large, these patterns have benefitted workers at the top of the income distribution, so that wage inequality has widened. As overall wage growth has increased during the pandemic, many previously disadvantaged workers—such as leisure and hospitality employees—have enjoyed particularly strong wage increases. This session will examine how much of the recent wage growth reflects overall labor market tightness, and how much has resulted from shifts in the types of workers that firms want to hire. Are recent patterns in labor demand likely to be permanent or temporary? And what do the data on labor demand imply for wage growth and wage inequality over the next several years?