Delaporte & Pena, 2020) to assess the ability to working from home. For example, Hatayama et al. (2020) utilize data from 53 countries on the task content of jobs to assess the amenability to working from home and find that lower income countries and male, less educated and self-employed workers have jobs less amenable to working from home. Other studies considering the issue of remote work and closures predicted a job crisis disproportionately affecting lower income and female workers, who tended to hold more jobs requiring faceto-face interactions (Avdiu & Nayyar, 2020). The IMF (2020) also found that the high proportion of jobs involving personal contact and low amenability to working from home in Latin America made that region’s jobs particularly vulnerable to loss relative to sales losses – largely due to exits from the labor force.

Some recent studies have also quantified adverse impacts on employment in developing countries, such as India (Beyer, Franco-Bedoya & Galdo, 2021; Deshpande, 2020; Dhingra & Machin, 2020) and Nigeria (Avenyo & Ndubuisi, 2020). Other studies such as Khamis et al. (2021) and Kugler et al. (2021) have conducted cross country analysis using data from high-frequency phone surveys (HFPS) conducted by the World Bank, covering countries across all developing regions. The former estimates that 19 percent of workers in lowincome countries, 37 percent in lower-middle-income countries, 41 percent in upper-middle-income countries, and 26 percent in high-income countries experienced a work stoppage.The latter finds that larger shares of female, young, less educated, and urban workers stopped working than others. Gender gaps in work stoppage were particularly pronounced and stemmed mainly from differences within sectors rather than differential employment patterns across sectors.

As the crisis continues to unfold, more papers have turned to the importance of labor demand shocks. Using real-time surveys, a number of researchers have documented the impact on layoffs by private firms of sales loss, closures, or liquidity issues (Bachas, et al., 2020; Bartik et al., 2020; Adams-Prassl et al., 2020; Fairlie, 2020). Apedo-Amah et al. (2020) use a dataset measuring the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the private sector, which covers more than 100,000 businesses across 51 countries. They find that firms that have experienced a larger reduction in sales experienced a larger reduction in employment. Using real-time data on vacancy postings on online job portals in Sweden, Hensvik et al. (2020) find that postings fell by 40 percent even during the earlier period of the pandemic. It has also been clear that, due to either social distancing measures or consumer risk aversion, contact-intensive sectors, such as travel, restaurant, and other services, have been greatly affected (Mongey et al., 2020). The large job losses in other sectors, such as manufacturing, have not been as obvious to all _a priori_ , whereas in other sectors, such as construction and agriculture, they may have been over-predicted due to the focus on the ability to work from home.

As the literature details, firms have been affected through multiple channels. First, the crisis affects levels and patterns of consumer spending. Domestic consumers reduce their mobility to reduce the risk of infection and avoid products and services that involve interactions with others (Andersen et al., 2020; Balleer et al., 2020). For example, Abay, Tafere and Woldemichael (2020) estimate how much the crisis affected demand for selected services across 182 countries using real-time Google search data. They find that the crisis led to a 63 percent reduction in demand for hotels and a comparable rate of increase in demand for ICT services. Firms have responded to reduced cash flow and high uncertainty by adjusting their investment (Boone, 2020) as well as their production and delivery technologies. Due to the disruption of supply chains, inventories have also been run down (Boone, 2020; Guan et al., 2020; Bonadio et al., 2020; Inoue & Todo, 2020). Trade has also been affected, possibly permanently (Baldwin & Weder di Mauro, 2020). Given these shocks, the ability to 6