The Impact of COVID-19 on E-Commerce Employment in the U.S.

Andrew Jiang

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic’s onset correlated with a shift in customer preference toward e-commerce platforms. This paper examines e-commerce employment data from the Federal Reserve Economic Data of the St. Louis Branch of Federal Reserve (FRED) in the nation and four states: California, Florida, Indiana, and Wisconsin. Only the years 2008-22 are considered for this study. It analyzes the trends in employment growth before and after the pandemic to conclude whether or not the pandemic permanently changed the e-commerce industry. These four states—representing two distinctive regions of the country- used the Linear Regression Model and Chow Test to test if a structural change in the trends of e-commerce employment occurred in the onset of the pandemic in the U.S. and if such changes were permanent. The paper concludes that despite an initial structural break point occurring during the pandemic, post-pandemic e-commerce employment growth remained similar to that of the pre-pandemic era.

Keywords: Structural Change, COVID-19, E-commerce, Employment

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