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Title: The Organizational Response to COVID-19: Legal Ambiguity and Cultural Cues

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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Abstract: Prevailing narratives about the early COVID-19 pandemic suggest that national policy asking firms to send their workers home was the cause of both the widespread transition to remote work and the severe, though short, “lockdown recession” of April 2020. In this paper, I develop Edelman’s theory (1991) of the role that organizations play in interpreting laws, arguing that because lockdowns were in enforceable at the state level, they were ambiguous and gave employers varying latitude to determine appropriate response. Using two novel datasets of state regulations and individual-level patterns of work, I show that lockdown strictures on their own had only a modest effect on how organizations adapted to the pandemic. Instead, employers instead largely relied on cultural cues to determine how they should adapt to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns.

Url: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1g5CelWJ4qy7X8YDO3VWdzaW1mbzI0LXC

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Authors: Hurwitz, Joshuamorris

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Population Health and Health Systems

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