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We measure the economic risk of Covid-19 at a geo-spatially detailed resolution. In addition to data about the current prevalence of confirmed cases, we use data from 2014-2018 to compute measures for exposure, vulnerability, and resilience of the local economy to the shock of the epidemic. Using a battery of proxies for these four concepts, we calculate the hazard and the principal components of exposure and vulnerability to it, and of the economy’s resilience (i.e., its ability to recover rapidly from the shock). We find that the economic risk of this pandemic is particularly high in most of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the Persian Gulf, and Southeast Asia. These results are consistent when comparing an ad hoc equal weighting algorithm for the four components of the index, an algorithm that assumes equal hazard for all countries, and one based on an estimated weights using...

We extract aggregate demand and supply shocks for the US economy from real-time survey data on inflation and real GDP growth using a novel identification scheme. Our approach exploits non-Gaussian features of macroeconomic forecast revisions and imposes minimal theoretical assumptions. After verifying that our results for US post-war business cycle fluctuations are largely in line with the prevailing consensus, we proceed to study output and price fluctuations during COVID-19. We attribute two thirds of the decline in 2020:Q1 GDP to a negative shock to aggregate demand. In contrast, regarding the staggeringly large decline in GDP in 2020:Q2, we estimate two thirds of this shock was due to a reduction in aggregate supply. Statistical analysis suggests a slow recovery due to persistent effects of the supply shock, but surveys suggest a somewhat faster rebound with a recovery in...

We analyse the short-term impact of social distancing measures on the US labour market, using a panel threshold model with high frequency (weekly) data on unemployment across US states. We find that changes in the restrictiveness of mandated social distancing, as measured by the Oxford Stringency Index, exert a strong immediate impact on initial unemployment. The unemployment rate is not immediate affected but follows within a very short time (two to four weeks). We also document a substantial asymmetry between tightening and easing: the impact of tightening restrictions is twice as large as that of easing them. The state of the endemic, proxied either by cases or fatalities, constitutes a marginal factor.

The covid-19 crisis has led to a sharp deterioration in firm and bank balance sheets. The government has responded with a massive intervention in corporate credit markets. We study equilibrium dynamics of macroeconomic quantities and prices, and how they are affected by government policy. The interventions prevent a much deeper crisis by reducing corporate bankruptcies by about half and short-circuiting the doom loop between corporate and financial sector fragility. The additional fiscal cost is zero since program spending replaces what would otherwise have been spent on intermediary bailouts. The model predicts rising interest rates on government debt and slow debt pay-down. We analyze an alternative intervention that targets aid to firms at risk of bankruptcy. While this policy prevents more bankruptcies and has lower fiscal cost, it only enjoys marginally higher welfare. Finally,...

In this paper we argue that endogenous shifts in private consumption behaviour across sectors of the economy can act as a potent mitigation mechanism during an epidemic or when the economy is re-opened after a temporary lockdown. Extending the theoretical framework proposed by Eichenbaum-Rebelo-Trabandt (2020), we distinguish goods by the degree to which they can be consumed at home rather than in a social (and thus possibly contagious) context. We demonstrate that, within the model the “Swedish solution” of letting the epidemic play out without government intervention and allowing agents to shift their sectoral behavior on their own can lead to a substantial mitigation of the economic and human costs of the Covid-19 crisis, avoiding more than 80% of the decline in output and of number of deaths within one year, compared to a model in which sectors are assumed to be homogeneous. For...

The “social distancing” measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19 impose economic costs that go beyond the contraction of GDP. Since different occupations are not equally affected, this supply shock may have distributional implications. Here, we evaluate the potential impact of enforced social distancing on wage inequality and poverty across Europe. We compute a Lockdown Working Ability (LWA) index which represents the capacity of individuals to work under a lockdown given their teleworking index −that we obtain for European occupations using 2018 EU-LFS− and whether their occupation is essential or closed. Combining our LWA index and 2018 EU-SILC, we calculate individuals’ potential wage losses under six scenarios of lockdown. The Lockdown Incidence Curves show striking differential wage losses across the distribution, and we consistently find that both poverty and...

We study the effects of international supply chain disruptions on real economic activity and prices during the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that US sectors with a large exposure to intermediate goods imports from China contracted significantly and robustly more than other sectors. In particular, highly exposed sectors suffered larger declines in production, employment, imports, and exports. Moreover, input and output prices moved up relative to other sectors, suggesting that real activity declines in sectors with a high China exposure were not particularly driven by a slump in demand. Quantitatively, differences in China exposures accounts for about 9% of the cross-sectoral variance of industrial production growth during March and April 2020. The estimated effects are short-lived effects and dissipate by July.

Using high-frequency proxies for economic activity over a large sample of countries, we show that the economic crisis during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic was only partly due to government lockdowns. Economic activity also contracted severely because of voluntary social distancing in response to higher infections. Furthermore, we show that lockdowns substantially reduced COVID-19 cases, especially if they were introduced early in a country’s epidemic. This implies that, despite involving short-term economic costs, lockdowns may pave the way to a faster recovery by containing the spread of the virus and reducing voluntary social distancing. Finally, we document that lockdowns entail decreasing marginal economic costs but increasing marginal benefits in reducing infections. This suggests that tight short-lived lockdowns are preferable to mild prolonged measures.

The COVID-19 crisis has the potential to turn into the biggest emerging market (EM) crisis since 1980s. We quantify the macroeconomic effects of COVID-19 for a small open economy by calibrating a SIR-multi-sector-macro model to Turkey. We measure sectoral supply shocks utilizing teleworking and physical job proximity, and sectoral demand shocks with credit card purchases. Both shocks are also affected from changing infection rates under different lockdown scenarios. Our results show that the optimal policy, which yields the lowest economic cost and saves the maximum number of lives, can be achieved under a full lockdown. Being an open economy amplifies the economic costs through two main channels. First, the demand shock has domestic and external components. Second, the initial shock is magnified due to domestic and international input-output linkages. The policy options are limited...

Many countries are shutting non-essential sectors of the economy to slow the spread of Covid-19. Older individuals have most to gain from slowing virus diffusion. Younger workers in sectors that are shuttered have the most to lose. In this paper we extend a standard epidemiological model of disease progression to include heterogeneity by age, and multiple sources of disease transmission. We then incorporate the epidemiological block into a multisector economic model in which workers differ by sector (basic and luxury) as well as by health status. We study optimal mitigation policies of a utilitarian government that can redistribute resources across individuals, but where such redistribution is costly. We show that optimal redistribution and mitigation policies interact, and reflect a compromise between the strongly diverging preferred policy paths across the subgroups of the population