Supply Chain Disruptions and Labor Shortages: Covid in Perspective

We use a neural network language model and dependency parsing to extract textual information about shortages from US corporate filings. This allows us to place the COVID pandemic in the broader context of other macroeconomic environments over the past 25 years. Shortages are much more prevalent during the pandemic than they are during other times, especially in the goods sector and for intermediate inputs. Firms also report significantly more increases in costs. The largest number of shortages occurs at the very end of our sample, in the first half of 2022. Our data are consistent with several known economic facts that are unrelated to the pandemic.