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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...

Policy makers responding to COVID-19 need to know people’s relative valuation of health over wealth. Loosening and tightening lockdowns moves a society along a (perceived) health-wealth trade-off and the associated changes have to accord with the public’s relative valuation of health and wealth for maximum compliance. In our survey experiment (N=4,618), we randomize information provision on economic and health costs to assess public preferences over this trade-off in the UK and the US. People strongly prioritize health over wealth, but the treatment effects suggest these priorities will change as experience of COVID-19 deaths and income losses evolves. Information also has heterogeneous/polarizing effects. These results encourage policy caution. Individual differences in health-wealth valuation highlight this study’s importance because they map onto compliance with current lockdown...

We examine the short-term labour market effects of COVID-19 and the associated national lockdown in Australia by estimating person-fixed-effects models using the Longitudinal Labour Force Survey. COVID-19 decreased labour force participation (LFP) by 2.1%, increased unemployment by 1.1% and reduced weekly working hours by 1.1. The national lockdown decreased LFP by 3.3%, increased unemployment by 1.7%, and decreased weekly working hours by 2.5. The probability of working on Fridays decreased by 10% while working fewer hours due to being on leave, work shifts, not having enough work and losing jobs all increased due to the lockdown. The pandemic and the lockdown increased underemployment and job search efforts significantly. In terms of heterogeneity of these effects, our analysis shows that those with up to high-school education experienced larger reductions in their LFP and working...

This study analyzes the benefits of statewide policy intervention in reducing COVID-19 deaths and the costs of that intervention in lost jobs and lower real gross state product (RGSP). Policy interventions are measured by the Oxford stringency index which places a daily numerical value on the level of a state’s policy intervention. Empirical evidence is provided that shows policy interventions have reduced COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. by 358,000 lives in 2020. On the cost side, it was found that policy intervention resulted in a loss of 7.3 million jobs and a decline of $410 billion in RGSP. The study concludes by integrating the findings related to the benefits and costs of policy interventions to the economic cost per life saved for every state, as well as an estimate of the national average cost per life of $1.1 million. That figure is compared to an age-adjusted value of...

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...

I calibrate a Multi-Risk SIR model on the covid pandemic to analyze the impact of the age-specific confinement and PCR testing policies on incomes and mortality. Two polar strategies emerge as potentially optimal. The suppression policy would crush the curve by confining 90% of the population for 4 months to eradicate the virus. The flatten-the-curve policy would reduce the confinement to 30% of the population for 5 months, followed by almost one year of free circulation of the virus to attain herd immunity without overwhelming hospitals. Both strategies yield a total cost of around 15% of annual GDP when combining the economic cost of confinement with the value of lives lost. I show that hesitating between the two strategies can have a huge societal cost, in particular if the suppression policy is stopped too early. Because seniors are much more vulnerable, a simple recommendation...

Social distancing is a matter of individuals’ choices as well as of regulation, and regulation arguably responds to those choices. We analyse weekly panel data on such behaviour for English Upper Tier Local Authorities (UTLAs) from March to July 2020, paying attention to the influence of poverty, as measured by free school meals provision. Panel regressions suggest that, although more stringent regulation and slightly lagged local cases of infection increase social distancing, both effects are weaker in UTLAs with higher levels of poverty. Thus motivated, we develop a two-class (rich/poor) model, in which a Nash non-cooperative equilibrium arises from individual choices in a regulatory regime with penalties for non-compliance. The model yields results in keeping with the empirical findings, indicating the desirability of generous measures to furlough workers in low-paid jobs as a...

This paper estimates the benefits and costs of state suppression policies to “bend the curve” during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. We employ a value-of-production approach that values benefits and costs in terms of additions or subtractions to total production. Relative to a baseline in which only the infected and at-risk populations mitigate the spread of coronavirus, we estimate that total benefits of suppression policies are between $605.9 billion and $841.1 billion from early March 2020 to August 1, 2020. Relative to private mitigation, the costs of suppression policies are estimated to be between $214.2 billion and $331.5 billion. The cost estimate is based on the duration of nonessential business closures and stay-at-home orders, which were enforced between 42 and 65 days. Our results indicate that the net benefits of suppression policies to slow...

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