This paper addresses the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing timely and accurate information on the impact of the current pandemic on income and poverty to inform the targeting of resources to those most affected and assess the success of current efforts. We construct new measures of the income distribution and poverty with a lag of only a few weeks using high-frequency data from the Basic Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), which collects income information for a large, representative sample of US families. Because the family income data for this project are rarely used, we validate this timely measure of income by comparing historical estimates that rely on these data to estimates from data on income and consumption that have been used much more broadly. Our results indicate that at the start of the pandemic, government policy effectively countered its effects on incomes, leading poverty to fall and low percentiles of income to rise across a range of demographic groups and geographies. Simulations that rely on the detailed CPS data and that closely match total government payments made show that the entire decline in poverty that we find can be accounted for by the rise in government assistance, including unemployment insurance benefits and the Economic Impact Payments. Our simulations further indicate that of those losing employment the vast majority received unemployment insurance, though this was less true early on in the pandemic, and receipt was uneven across the states, with some states not reaching a large share of their out of work residents. Updated results during the pandemic for a subset of the tables in this article can be found at povertymeasurement.org.

本文通过提供有关当前大流行对收入和贫困影响的及时，准确的信息来解决COVID-19大流行的经济影响，以将资源用于受影响最大的人群，并评估当前工作的成功。我们使用来自基本月度当前人口调查（CPS）的高频数据，构建了仅几周滞后的收入分配和贫困的新度量标准，该数据收集了美国大量具有代表性的家庭的收入信息。由于很少使用该项目的家庭收入数据，因此，我们通过比较依赖于这些数据的历史估算值与来自更广泛使用的收入和消费数据的估算值，来验证这种及时的收入测度。我们的结果表明，在大流行开始时，政府政策有效地抵消了其对收入的影响，导致贫困在各种人口群体和地区中下降，而收入的低百分位数在上升。依靠详细的CPS数据并与政府总付款额非常匹配的模拟表明，我们发现的贫困的全部减少可以由政府援助的增加来解释，包括失业保险金和经济影响付款。我们的模拟进一步表明，在失业者中，绝大多数人都获得了失业保险，尽管在大流行初期这种情况并不那么真实，各州的收入也不平衡，有些州的失业人口比例不高。