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How are mobility levels correlated with Covid-19 transmission rates?

18 May 2020
In a new paper Nittai Bergman and Ram Fishman study the correlation between mobility and the spread of Covid 19 across a number of countries.

Optimizing behavior alters predictions of epidemiological models

15 May 2020
There is a surge of papers in economics that integrate economic models with the canonical epidemiological SIR model. Two recent papers show that incorporating individual decision-making alters key predictions of the SIR model.

How do media affect people’s incentives to comply with lockdown?

13 May 2020
Conservative media coverage during the pandemic affects negatively people’s compliance with the social distancing rules, suggests new US county-level study.

Lessons for Covid-19 from previous pandemics

13 May 2020
Studies on previous pandemic episodes find large and persistent effects on the real economy, meaning GDP, consumption and real rates of return.

Do lockdowns work? A counterfactual for Sweden

13 May 2020
A paper by Benjamin Born, Alexander M. Dietrich and Gernot J. Müller study the case of Sweden – one of the few countries without a lockdown – and use synthetic control techniques to develop a counterfactual lockdown scenario. They find that a lockdown would not have helped much in Sweden.

Counterproductive Incentives in the Business Compensation Scheme

11 May 2020
The Norwegian government has designed a business compensation scheme to help firms avoid bankruptcies and keep operating during the corona crisis.

Flawed risk assessment and policy decisions

10 May 2020
Humans are bad at assessing risk even in the best of times. During a pandemic – when the disease is unfamiliar, people are isolated and stressed, and the death toll is rising – our risk perception becomes even more distorted. This is a recipe for disastrous policy mistakes.

Covid-19 and early retirement

10 May 2020
A new working paper by Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko and Michael Weber use a repeated large-scale survey of (representative) households in the Nielsen Homescan panel to characterize how labor markets are being affected by the covid-19 pandemic. There is some evidence of an effect on early retirement choices.

The State of the Union conference: “Europe: Managing the COVID-19 Crisis”

06 May 2020
The State of the Union Secretariat live-streams this year's special online edition of the conference: “Europe: Managing the COVID-19 Crisis”, this coming Friday on 8 May.

How much and when should we limit economic activity to ensure the health-care system is not overwhelmed?

06 May 2020
In a recent working paper entitled "Optimal epidemic suppression under an ICU constraint", network members Laurent Miclo, Daniel Spiro and Jörgen Weibull analyze this question and show that "flattening the curve" is not theoretically optimal, instead one should "fill the box".