COVID-19 and County-Level Economic Impacts: Analyzing Heterogeneity in the State of California

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused widespread economic destruction throughout the state of California. In this paper, I use employment and small business data from the Opportunity Insights Economic tracker combined with income and industry sector from the national census and BLS to explore the relationship between median county income, industry distribution, and changes in small business revenue and employment levels over the course of the pandemic. While my findings regarding industry distribution were inconclusive, I found a negative relationship between county median income and changes in employment, as well as a negative relationship between small business revenue and county median income. I conclude my paper by putting forth some potential causal hypotheses