Current Research
List viewEconomists from around the world are using real time data collection to better understand the impact the Covid-19 crisis is having on families, workers, firms and society, and how policies can help the recovery out of the crisis. Find out more about how these research teams are carrying out their projects, and what their findings are below.
Coronavirus and climate change – individual spillover in private public good provision
The need for private climate protection measures to achieve the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreements is not in question. But how does this insight change in the light of another global crisis, the corona pandemic? People are scared by infectious...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Elke D. Groh
Countries
Consumers' mobility, expenditure and online- offline substitution response to Covid-19: evidence from French transaction data
This paper investigates a number of general phenomena connected with consumer behaviour in response to a severe economic shock, using billions of French card transactions measured before and during the Covid-19 epidemic. We examine changes in consume...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: David Bounie
Countries
“Do governors lead or follow? timing of stay-at-home orders”
I use daily Google search data on the keyword ``Coronavirus" to track early resident interest in the novel Coronavirus pandemic. I ask whether governors are responding to heightened interest (i.e., following) or if their decisions are independen...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Bryan C. McCannon
Countries
Well-being, religious beliefs and virtual relations at the time of Covid-19 lockdown
Covid-19 social distancing and lockdown are affecting individual lifestyles. We created a socio-economic survey addressed to a representative sample of the Italian (N=1,000) and US (N=1,400) population, focusing on three aspects of this phenomenon. (...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Luigino Bruni
The Covid-19 bailouts
US policy makers responded to the Covid-19 epidemic by providing $1.8 trillion in private sector bailouts. We collect data on all bailouts for publicly-listed firms, document empirical facts of the bailout programs and discuss policy implications. Mo...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Jean-Marie Meier
Countries
Solidarity and fairness in times of crisis
In a large-scale survey experiment, we examine how the Covid-19 pandemic causally affects key components of people's moral perspective. We investigate whether the crisis moves people towards solidarity, how it affects their attitudes to inequali...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Alexander W. Cappelen
Countries
Seller reputation and price gouging: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
We test the theory that seller reputation moderates the effect of demand shocks on a seller's propensity to price gouge. From mid January to mid March 2020, 3M masks were priced 2.72 times higher than Amazon sold them in 2019. However, the diffe...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Luis Cabral
Living at the peak: health and public finance during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper provides novel evidence for the determinants of preferences for public health and the willingness to pay for health services using a survey experiment implemented during the third week of the lock-down in Spain. At the time of our experime...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Dirk Foremny
Countries
Explaining governors’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States
What is the response of US governors to the Covid-19 pandemic? In this research note, we explore the determinants of implementing stay-at-home orders, focusing on governors’ characteristics. In our most conservative estimate, being a Democratic gov...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Leonardo Baccini
Countries
Changes in preferences due to Covid-19: a longitudinal study from the northern Finland birth cohorts
Remarkable events such as large pandemics (Covid-19) can presumably cause changes in people’s preferences, e.g. in their attitudes towards risk-taking and trust. These effects can be permanent, or at least persist for a long time. We explore the ef...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Marko Korhonen
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 on violence against women and children in Germany
To contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly a quarter of the world’s population is currently under lockdown or practicing physical distancing. These measures may have inadvertent consequences. In this project, we study the implications o...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Cara Ebert
Countries
Stability of economic preferences in times of crisis
Economic preferences such as risk, time, and social preferences play an important role for a wide range of individual behavior and outcomes as well as aggregated economic variables (e.g. GDP growth, volume of trade between countries). While neoclassi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Daniel Engler
Countries
Restarting the economy while saving lives under Covid-19
We provide, calibrate and test a realistic model of the spread of SARS-Cov-2 in an economy where the population has different age groups and sectors. The model takes into account factors that have proved to be essential in explaining features of the ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Carlo Favero
Countries
Housing market discrimination following the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China
Following the Covid-19 outbreak, there were frequent reports of discrimination against ethnic Asians across the world. Discrimination within countries often targeted individuals from the epicenters of the outbreak. We focus on the impacts of discrimi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ziming Liu
Countries
Coronavirus perceptions and economic anxiety
We provide one of the first systematic assessments of the development and determinants of economic anxiety at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Using a global dataset on internet searches and two representative surveys from the US, we document a...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Thiemo Fetzer
Countries
Civic capital and social distancing: evidence from the response to Covid-19 in Italy and Germany
Social distancing can succeed in slowing the spread of Covid-19 if citizens voluntary comply with it and internalize the cost of their mobility on others. How do civic values mediate this process? Using data on individual mobility across Italian prov...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ruben Durante
The impact of Covid-19 lockdown on employment and mental health
Enforcing social distancing via economy-wide lockdown is considered as an effective measure to prevent transmission of the novel coronavirus Covid-19. Consequently, accompanied by a large number of job losses, a lockdown has severe labor market and e...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Kabir Dasgupta
Countries
Poverty and economic dislocation reduce compliance with Covid-19 shelter-in-place protocols
Shelter-in-place policies reduce social contact and mitigate the spread of Covid-19. Inconsistent compliance with social distancing creates local and regional interpersonal transmission risks. Using county-day measures on population movement derived ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Austin L. Wright
Countries
Lock-down or let-it-flow: a spatial analysis of Covid-19 on Chinese economy
This paper studies the impacts of the outbreak of the Covid-19 and the lock-down policy on the Chinese economy. Combining the changes of daily migration flow data, industrial outputs data, population census data, and a spatial equilibrium model, we q...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Minjie Deng
Countries
Covid-19, firm exposure, and firm value: a tale of two lockdowns
We study how a public health crisis affects firms at different phases of outbreak. Using an event study approach, we find that the stock market in China responded significantly to two symbolic events in the outbreak of Covid-19: (1) the lockdown of H...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Haoyuan Ding
Countries
