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Current Research

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Economists 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.

Economic policy responses to a pandemic: developing the Covid-19 economic stimulus index

In this project, we conduct a comprehensive review of different economic policy measures adopted by 166 countries as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic and create a large database including fiscal, monetary, and exchange rate measures. Furthermore, ...
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Ceyhun Elgin

The heterogeneous labor market impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic

We study the distributional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on employment. Using CPS data on stocks and flows, we show that the pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing inequalities. Although employment losses have been widespread, ...
Lead investigator: Matias Cortes
Countries

Covid 19: a new challenge for the European monetary union

Although the pandemic was an exogenous shock, it triggered portfolio rebalancing in the Euro Area (EA) implying a divergence of sovereign risk premia in the first phase of the crisis eventually followed by a narrowing of the spreads. We estimate the ...
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Anne-Laure Delatte

Poverty and Covid-19 in developing countries

In March 2020, shelter-in-place and social-distancing policies have been enforced or recommended all over the world to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. However, strict containment is hardly achievable in low-income countries, as large parts of population...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Olivier Bargain

Assessing impacts on and resilience to food insecurity amid the Covid-19 lockdowns in Nigeria

As of the end of May 2020, there have been over 9000 cases and over 260 deaths from Covid-19 in Nigeria and cases have been rising quickly in recent weeks. To prevent the spread of the virus, governments in multiple states have imposed lockdowns. Whi...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Elena M Martinez
Countries

Effectiveness of government policies in response to the Covid-19 outbreak

This paper assesses the quantitative impact of government interventions on deaths related to the Covid-19 outbreak. Using daily data for 32 countries and relying on the stringency of the conducted policies, we find that the greater the strength of go...
Secondary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Lead investigator: Theologos Dergiades

Risk perception and oil and gas markets under pandemic: evidence from Covid-19

The novel coronavirus (Covid-19) exposed individuals and investors to a great uncertainty about its short- and long-term health and economic ramifications, especially in the early days and weeks of the outbreak. This study documents oil and gasoline ...
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Behzod B. Ahundjanov

Income effect in private contribution of public goods: economic impact payment in the Covid-19 pandemic

This paper studies the public good nature of Covid-19 mitigation effort, and illustrates the relationship between income level and the voluntary contribution to the Covid-19 mitigation effort. I build a theoretical model to show that there exists a t...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Ruohao Zhang
Countries

Covid-19 shocking global value chains

The Covid-19 epidemic hit China in December 2019. Even before it turned into a pandemic, Covid-19 has strongly affected the world economy through global value chains. We use a quantitative trade model with input-output linkages to gauge the effects o...
Primary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Peter Eppinger
Countries

How online gig economy reshapes the international labour market amid Covid-19

Enabled by the Internet technology, online digital employment platforms have presented opportunities for employers and freelancers to find each other regardless of their physical locations and at lower administrative and search costs. The evolution o...
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Yuan Gao

Estimating the costs and benefits of mandated business closures in a pandemic

Typical government responses to pandemics involve social distancing measures implemented to curb disease propagation. We evaluate the impact of state-mandated business closures in the context of the Covid-19 crisis in the US. Using state-level variat...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Jean-Noel Barrot
Countries

Democracy, culture, and contagion: political regimes and countries responsiveness to Covid-19

A widely held belief is that autocratic governments have been more effective in reducing the movement of people to curb the spread of Covid-19. Using the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), and a real-time dataset with daily informa...
Lead investigator: Carl Benedikt Frey

Political institutions and policy responses during a crisis

Do countries with differing political institutions respond differently to a national crisis? The coronavirus pandemic, where almost all countries were hit by the same crisis in a short span of time, provides a rare opportunity to answer this question...
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Gaurav Chiplunkar

Should I stay or should I go (out): the role of trust and norms in disease prevention during pandemics

In this paper we construct country specific indices of mobility and trust. We use Google Covid 19 Community Mobility Reports for the former, and World Values Survey and the European Values Study for the latter. We find that the trust index has some p...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Toker Doganoglu

Information search and financial market performance under pandemic: evidence from Covid-19

The discovery, and subsequent spread, of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) exposed both individuals and investors to a grave uncertainty about the potential health and economic ramifications of the virus, particularly in the early days and weeks of th...
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Behzod B. Ahundjanov
Countries

The effect of Covid-19 on labor market flows by occupation and gender

For the US and Canada, we compare the Covid-19 effect on gender in terms of labour flows including movements in and out of employment, unemployment and non-participation as well as the allocations across occupations. In particular, we categorize occu...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Audra J. Bowlus
Countries

Partisanship and public health: early evidence from Belgium during the Covid-19 pandemic

We investigate how partisanship affects the authority of the executive branch by looking at the relationship between electoral support for the governing coalition and Covid-19 deaths across Belgian municipal districts. Applying spatial autoregressive...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Arthur Dyevre
Countries

Public firm borrowers of the us paycheck protection program

We provide an initial assessment of the US Paycheck Protection Program by studying the 273 public firms that received a total of $929 million in loans between April 7-27, 2020. Despite receiving significant media coverage, these firms comprise 0.3% o...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Anna Cororaton
Countries

Demand for public events in the Covid-19 pandemic: a case study of European football

This study uses data from elite-level European football matches and panel data methods to suggest how people responded to the initial Covid-19 outbreak. In Italy, England and Germany, stadium attendances were negatively affected by the previous day&#...
Lead investigator: J. James Reade

Hate crime in time of the Corona

The news of the novel virus first reached the world when the World Health Organisation (WHO) confirmed the first case in China on December 31, 2019. As the danger it posed to the public grew and the virus spread first across China, then to Europe and...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Joel Carr
Countries