Estimating state and local employment in recent disasters—from Hurricane Harvey to the COVID-19 pandemic

Natural disasters, including hurricanes, floods, wildfires, and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, have challenged the standard practices used to produce state and area employment estimates. In some cases, these challenges have led to modifications to the handling of reported business closures, assumptions regarding nonresponse, and the techniques used for modeling employment in domains with small samples for state and metropolitan areas. This article examines how a series of major hurricanes in 2017 and 2018 affected the estimation of state and metropolitan area payroll employment and how lessons learned from these disasters provided a playbook for producing estimates during the COVID-19 pandemic. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES) program produces some of the timeliest economic indicators each month, both for the nation as a whole and for varying levels of geographic detail.