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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.

Shock salience and heterogeneity in individual behavior

We study heterogeneity in attitudes and behavior after the Covid-19 crisis in the population of international students across several university campuses in North America. More specifically, we study whether the response to the shock varies by field ...
Lead investigator: Livia Alfonsi
Countries

Lives or livelihoods? perceived trade-offs and public demand for non-pharmaceutical interventions

We study the role of cost-benefit considerations in driving public demand for nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a large-scale online survey experiment with a representative sample of the US population, we introdu...
Lead investigator: Sonja Settele
Countries

Civic capital and social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic

The success of non-pharmaceutical interventions to contain pandemics often depends greatly upon voluntary compliance with government guidelines. What explains variation in voluntary compliance? Using mobile phone and survey data, we show that during ...
Lead investigator: John M Barrios

Covid-19 and the demand for flexible annuities

The demand for voluntary lifetime annuities is low. Two potential driving mechanisms behind this phenomenon are uninsurable risk early in life and financial illiteracy. Covid-19 generates a large amount of uncertainty for workers. We measure preferen...
Lead investigator: Pim Koopmans
Countries

Community health care and Covid-19 pandemic: experimental evidence from Uganda

The limited capacity of the health systems in many low-income countries, especially in rural areas, suggests that the rapid spreading of the Covid-19 virus could have huge consequences in those areas. On top of the direct impact of the virus, a growi...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Martina Bjorkman-Nyqvist
Countries

Promoting social distancing in a pandemic: beyond the good intentions

Reminders to promote social distancing have been ubiquitous throughout the Covid-19 crisis, but little is known about their effectiveness. Existing studies find positive impacts on intentions to comply, but no evidence exists of actual behavioural ch...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Paolo Falco
Countries

Does the Covid-19 pandemic increase or decrease pro-sociality and does it shift donations towards more local causes?

Locally occurring natural catastrophes typically seem to increase international solidarity (Scharf, Smith, and Ottoni-Wilhelm 2017). The global spread of the Covid-19 is unprecedented such that it is not clear what types of behavioral responses it is...
Lead investigator: Maja Adena
Countries

Improving task completion by school principals during the Covid-19 crisis

We study whether neutral, positive, or negative reinforcement messages given to schools’ principals can improve their bureaucratic efficiency in times of crisis. Under the Covid-19 health emergency urgency, the Ministry of Education asked all schoo...
Lead investigator: Daniel Morales

Ethnic employment gap during the Covid-19 outbreak: great equalizer or divider?

Many employees lose their jobs as the result of Covid-19 outbreak (ILO, 19 March 2020). Moreover, the number of job openings decreases, making it harder for applicants to compete. This challenging situation can be particularly hard for minority group...
Lead investigator: Igor Asanov
Countries

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

Working from home: occupations and performance, results from Hungary

In the world of strict measures against the pandemic including stay-at-home orders and lockdowns working from home is part of the solutions to keep the economy running. In this paper we construct a simple measure of working from home potential using ...
Lead investigator: Bence Kiss-Dobronyi
Countries

The impact of Covid-19 on work and time-use in the family

This project analyses the impact of the severe contention measures and stay-home orders resulting from the Covid-19 outbreak on the work and time-use of families in Spain. Between March 14 and May 2, 2020, the country suffered the strictest lockdown ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Lídia Farré
Countries

Privacy under pandemics: Do we really want to be tracked?

During the current Covid-19 situation, health authorities across the globe are gathering and using personal data to efficiently track and fight the spreading of the disease. Citizen are asked to trade privacy against better health or against a faster...
Lead investigator: Ole Christian Wasenden
Countries

The effects of Covid-19 crisis on Japanese households: a study using the data from the special survey of Japan Household Panel Survey(JHPS)

Using the data from the special survey of the Japan Household Panel Survey (JHPS), this study aims to clarify the effects of Covid-19 crisis on households, labour market outcome, health and wellbeing, and how those changes affect inequality in Japan....
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Isamu Yamamato
Countries

Covid-19 lockdown, institutional responsiveness, and household well-being: evidence from India

The countrywide lockdown has been the dominant strategy of the Indian government to arrest the rise of the Covid-19 pandemic. While the state and central governments should be focusing on formulating broad policies, the local government (Panchayats) ...
Lead investigator: Vivek Pandey
Countries

Stereotypes and political attitudes in the age of coronavirus: empirical evidence from Italy

The novel coronavirus has led to increasing concerns about racial discrimination and anti-EU sentiment in various European countries. We use a newly-developed bot that works through Facebook Messenger to conduct a longitudinal online survey in Italy ...
Lead investigator: Dante Donati
Countries

The impact of lockdown on the division of housework and childcare in French households

Before the Covid-19 outbreak, the burden of unpaid work in Europe, e.g. housework and childcare, was mostly carried-out by women - with women spending around 22 hours per week and men only 9 hours per week in unpaid work (European Commission 2019). W...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Anne Boring
Countries

Prosocial behavior in the time of Covid-19: the effect of private and public role models

In public good provision and other collective action problems, people are uncertain about how to balance self-interest and prosociality. Actions of others may inform this decision. We conduct an experiment to test the effect of private and public rol...
Lead investigator: Martin Abel
Countries

Children’s education and use of time during the Covid-19 lockdown in France and Italy

The Covid-19 crisis has large impacts on the economy and these impacts are probably highly unequal among individuals and families. From a family perspective the lockdown situation is having a tremendous impact on two fundamental assets of families we...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Hugues Champeaux
Countries

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...
Lead investigator: Elke D. Groh
Countries