Shedding light on truck driver supply and demand: Heterogeneous state‐level recovery of trucking employment following the COVID‐19 employment shock

Is there a long‐term systemic shortage of truck drivers? We throw light on the underlying context—the demand for and supply of truck drivers—by investigating why states within the contiguous United States showed vastly different rates of recovery of state‐level truck transportation payrolls for May 2020–December 2021 following the negative employment shock brought about by COVID‐19 lockdowns in April 2020. We focus on heterogeneity in the industries that create demand for trucking services: state‐level natural resource extraction, warehousing, and container port activity. We create a state‐level archival data set of truck transportation establishment payrolls from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, which we combine with other archival sources. We test our hypotheses via discontinuous growth curve models estimated using the mixed effects modeling framework. We find states that saw greater declines in natural resource extraction activity had much slower growth in trucking payrolls for May 2020–December 2021, whereas states that saw more warehousing activity growth or were home to large container ports saw faster growth in trucking payrolls. Our work extends theories regarding labor market dynamics in truck transportation and factor market rivalry, in addition to having important implications for managers and policy makers.