MoneyGeek, a personal finance technology company, has developed a data product “Tracking Coronavirus Unemployment in the US” to track and help unemployed Americans. The tracking tool includes local and community resources to help workers who have lost wages and jobs for 383 cities in America.
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MoneyGeek’s “Tracking Coronavirus Unemployment in the US” was designed to visualize the economic impact of coronavirus as it relates to unemployment on a national, state, and city level. At the city level, the tool provides local resources for workers and small businesses impacted by coronavirus, the projected total of unemployment due to coronavirus, and an unemployment-by-sector tracker to help communities understand the industries that are fueling the local economy.
Methodology
The national and state tracking tools aggregate data on confirmed coronavirus cases and unemployment numbers across the United States. To provide accurate information, MoneyGeek’s tracker updates every 10 minutes to share relevant coronavirus case data. Unemployment numbers, initial jobless claims, projections and timeline events are updated regularly. The tracker displays the number of confirmed cases as reported by the Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 Global Case map. For statistics on jobless claims, MoneyGeek’s tool relies on data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims Report and FRED Economic Research. Search tools like Google Trends and government data are used to forecast upcoming jobless numbers. Unemployment figures are updated weekly with the Thursday release of the latest government data on initial jobless claims for the previous week.
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At the MSA/city level, to estimate the total coronavirus-related unemployment, MoneyGeek’s team of data scientists, analysts and product engineers aggregated national unemployment projections from leading economists, including Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and the Federal Reserve. Using available information on affected industries and essential jobs, the team reviewed 35 employment sectors as published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and judged which ones would experience greater or fewer job losses than the overall unemployment forecast. These sector-specific assumptions about lost jobs were then aggregated to estimate each city’s total lost jobs by incorporating the areas’ employment by industry.
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