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The COVID-19 crisis has led to substantial reductions in earnings. We propose a new measure of financial vulnerability, computable through survey data, to determine whether households can withstand a certain income shock for a defined period of time. Using data from the ECB Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) we analyse pre-existing financial vulnerability in seven EU countries. We find that income support is essential for many families: 47.2 million individuals, out of the 243 million considered, cannot afford three months of food and housing expenses without privately earned income. Differences across countries are stark, and those born outside of the EU are especially vulnerable. Through a tax-benefit microsimulation exercise, we then derive household net income when employees are laid-off and awarded the COVID-19 employment protection benefits enacted in the different...

Social distancing interventions can be effective against epidemics but are potentially detrimental for the economy. Businesses that rely heavily on face-to-face communication or close physical proximity when producing a product or providing a service are particularly vulnerable. There is, however, no systematic evidence on the role of human interactions across different lines of business and about which will be the most limited by social distancing. In this paper we provide theory-based measures of the reliance of US businesses on human interaction, detailed by industry and geographic location. We find that 49 million workers work in occupations that rely heavily on faceto-face communication or require close physical proximity to other workers. Our model suggests that when businesses are forced to reduce worker contacts by half, they need a 12% wage subsidy to compensate for the...

We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households’ spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. About 50% of survey participants report income and wealth losses due to the corona virus, with the average losses being $5,293 and $33,482 respectively. Aggregate consumer spending dropped by 31 log percentage points with the largest drops in travel and clothing. We find that households living in counties that went into lockdown earlier expect the unemployment rate over the next twelve months to be 13 percentage points higher and continue to expect higher unemployment at horizons of three to five years. They also expect lower future inflation, report higher uncertainty, expect lower mortgage rates for up to 10 years, and have moved out of foreign...

Fragmented by policies, united by outcomes: This is the picture of the United States that emerges from our analysis of the spatial diffusion of Covid-19 and the scattered lock-down policies introduced by individual states to contain it. We first use spatial econometric techniques to document direct and indirect spillovers of new infections across county and state lines, as well as the impact of individual states’ lock-down policies on infections in neighboring states. We find consistent statistical evidence that new cases diffuse across county lines, holding county level factors constant, and that the diffusion across counties was affected by the closure policies of adjacent states. Spatial impulse response functions reveal that the diffusion across counties is persistent for up to ten days after an increase in adjacent counties. We then develop a spatial version of the...

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.

This study quantifies the economic effect of a possible lockdown of Tokyo to prevent the spread of Covid-19. The negative effect of the lockdown may propagate to other regions through supply chains because of a shortage of supply and demand. Applying an agent-based model to the actual supply chains of nearly 1.6 million firms in Japan, we simulate what would happen to production activities outside Tokyo when production activities that are not essential to citizens’ survival in Tokyo were shut down for a certain period. We find that when Tokyo is locked down for a month, the indirect effect on other regions would be twice as large as the direct effect on Tokyo, leading to a total production loss of 27 trillion yen in Japan, or 5.3% of its annual GDP. Although the shut down in Tokyo accounts for 21% of the total production in Japan, the lockdown would result in a reduction in the...

We measure labor demand and supply shocks at the sector level around the Covid-19 outbreak, by estimating a Bayesian structural vector autoregression on monthly statistics of hours worked and real wages and applying the methodology proposed by Baumeister and Hamilton (2015). Our estimates suggest that two-thirds of the 16.24 percentage point drop in the growth rate of hours worked in April 2020 are attributable to supply. Most sectors were subject to historically large negative labor supply and demand shocks in March and April 2020, but there is substantial heterogeneity in the size of these shocks across sectors. Leisure and Hospitality was particularly affected. We find positive labor demand shocks for sectors such as Retail Trade, and Information in March 2020 that vanish in April 2020. We show that our estimates of supply shocks are correlated with sectoral measures of telework.

This paper uses administrative, survey, and online vacancy data to analyze the short-term labor market impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown in Greece. We find that flows into unemployment have not increased; in fact, separations were lower than would have been expected given trends in recent years. At the same time, employment was about 12 percent lower at the end of June than it would have been without the pandemic. The interrupted time series and difference-in-differences estimates indicate that this was due to a dramatic slowdown in hiring during months when job creation typically peaks in normal years, mostly in tourism. While we do not formally test the reasons for these patterns, our analysis suggests that the measures introduced to mitigate the effects of the crisis in Greece have played an important role. These measures prohibited layoffs in industries affected by the crisis and...

Though COVID vaccines are finally available, the rate at which they are administered is slow, and in the meantime the pandemic continues to claim about as many lives every day as the 9/11 tragedy. I estimate that with the promised rate of vaccinations, if no additional non-pharmaceutical interventions are implemented, 406 thousand additional lives will be lost and the future cost of the pandemic will reach $2.4 trillion, or 11% of GDP. Using a cost-benefit analysis, I assess whether it is optimal for the United States to follow the lead of many European countries and introduce a nation-wide lockdown. I find that a lockdown would be indeed optimal and, depending on the assumptions, it should last between two and four weeks and will generate a net benefit of up to $1.2 trillion.

The health crisis caused by the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus has led many countries to implement drastic measures of social distancing. By reducing the quantity of labour, social distancing in turn leads to a drop in output which is difficult to quantify without taking into account relationships between sectors. Starting from a standard model of production networks, we analyse the sectoral effects of the shock in the case of France. We estimate that six weeks of social distancing brings GDP down by 5.6%. Apart from sectors directly impacted by social distancing measures, those whose value-added decreases the most are upstream sectors, i.e. sectors most distant from final demand. The same exercise is carried out for other European countries, taking into account national differences in sectoral composition and propensity to telework. Finally, we analyse the economic impact of phasing...