More Than Money: Job Quality, Employment, and Occupational Change through the Pandemic
November 03, 2026
Summary
The pandemic affected the experience of many workers. Using matched survey data, the authors explore the importance of job quality in employment and occupation-switching decisions before, during, and after the pandemic.
View PaperWorking Paper 2026-19
Abstract: We study how the quality of an occupation, measured by the autonomy it gives workers and by how exposed its work is, bore on two decisions through the COVID-19 pandemic. The first is whether a worker employed on one date was also employed a year later, and the second is whether a worker employed on both dates changed occupation. We build autonomy and safety scores for 474 occupations from the Occupational Requirements Survey and O*NET and attach them to matched Current Population Survey records for 2018 to 2025. We find that workers in occupations with more autonomy were more likely to be employed a year later during the pandemic, but not before or after it. Whether a worker changed occupation depended on job quality, and in particular on the autonomy of the occupations that workers leaving the same occupation moved into and on the safety of the occupation the worker held. We find no change across the periods in the effect of job quality on occupation change. Workers who changed occupation gained slightly more autonomy after March 2020 than before, and slightly more safety after 2022, although these gains are small.
JEL classification: J62, J63, J81, J28, J16, I18
Key words: job quality, occupational mobility, working conditions, autonomy, COVID-19, Current Population Survey
https://doi.org/10.29338/wp2026-19
Julie L. Hotchkiss is a research economist and senior adviser in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
M. Melinda Pitts is research center director of the Center for Human Capital Studies in the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
Authors are listed in alphabetical order. Research assistance from David Wilson and Benjamin Miller is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta or the Federal Reserve System.
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