Rutgers economist William Rodgers III (a former chief economist at the Department of Labor) and the Century Foundation’s Andrew Stettner built a model using these kinds of unemployment claims numbers to predict the unemployment rate. Plugging in the most recent claims data, they estimate a true unemployment rate in March of 17 percent. In some states, they find the unemployed share is far greater than that: 44.9 percent in Louisiana, 44.6 percent in New Hampshire, 34.6 percent in Pennsylvania.
Coronavirus could lead to the highest unemployment levels since the Great Depression
April 2, 2020
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