1 Welcome!

This book explains the so-called “Long COVID Project”– an investigation into the substantial rise in disability incidence since 2019, the potential role of COVID-19, and labor market outcomes for individuals with disabilities. It is a continuation of a paper authored by Louise and Nasiha in 2022 examining the labor market impacts of long COVID.

This book is meant to motivate the research, identify important files, dive into the do-files that clean and analyze our data, and get you up to speed on where the project is headed.

A note on the code

This project is coded in STATA. There are many do-files used in this research, and we pull from many different sources of data. Our main results, which I call “the main analysis” examine disability rates and labor force participation for the disability population using BLS’s Current Population Survey (CPS). This is the heart of our analysis. I also created subsidiary do-files – which I call “the breakdowns” – that execute more specific analyses. For example, we look at breakdowns by gender, education, state, etc. These are branches of the main analysis that help us better understand what is driving our results. This book explains what each of these files is meant to accomplish, but it does not provide a comprehensive, line-by-line description of the code. The do-files themselves are extensively commented, however, so you should get a good picture of what each chunk of code does by reading through them.

⚠️⚠️⚠️WARNING⚠️⚠️⚠️

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE copy the Excel files that I have pre-formatted to your own directory. That way, Stata will output the data to a sheet that has all of the graphs made already! PLEASE DO NOT REMAKE ALL THESE GRAPHS, IT WILL TAKE YOU TWO YEARS!!!!

I recommend reviewing this document in its entirety before diving in! Best of luck!

Georgia ❤️❤️❤️❤️