Current Research
List viewEconomists 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.
Preferences, beliefs and behavior during the Covid-19 outbreak
In this study, we examine the effect of the Covid-19 outbreak on beliefs, behavior and preferences in the United States. To identify direct economic effects of the crisis, we measure the negative impact of the pandemic on participants’ health and f...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Sheryl Ball
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ole Christian Wasenden
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Behzod B. Ahundjanov
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 ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Dante Donati
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Arthur Dyevre
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&#...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: J. James Reade
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Martin Abel
Countries
In crisis we pray: religiosity and the Covid-19 pandemic
In times of crisis, humans have a tendency to turn to religion for comfort and explanation. The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic is no exception. Daily data on Google searches for 95 countries demonstrates that the Covid-19 crisis has increased Google searches...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Jeanet Sinding Bentzen
Trust and compliance to public health policies in time of Covid-19
The Covid-19 crisis has led to fast policy responses all over the world to reduce social interaction and limit contagion. Using Google mobility data at regional level in Europe, we study whether the compliance to containment policies depends on the l...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Olivier Bargain
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Elke D. Groh
Countries
Solidarity and fairness in times of crisis
In a large-scale survey experiment, we examine how the Covid-19 pandemic causally affects key components of people's moral perspective. We investigate whether the crisis moves people towards solidarity, how it affects their attitudes to inequali...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Alexander W. Cappelen
Countries
“Do governors lead or follow? timing of stay-at-home orders”
I use daily Google search data on the keyword ``Coronavirus" to track early resident interest in the novel Coronavirus pandemic. I ask whether governors are responding to heightened interest (i.e., following) or if their decisions are independen...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Bryan C. McCannon
Countries
Changes in preferences due to Covid-19: a longitudinal study from the northern Finland birth cohorts
Remarkable events such as large pandemics (Covid-19) can presumably cause changes in people’s preferences, e.g. in their attitudes towards risk-taking and trust. These effects can be permanent, or at least persist for a long time. We explore the ef...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Marko Korhonen
Countries
Living at the peak: health and public finance during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper provides novel evidence for the determinants of preferences for public health and the willingness to pay for health services using a survey experiment implemented during the third week of the lock-down in Spain. At the time of our experime...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Dirk Foremny
Countries
Explaining governors’ response to the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States
What is the response of US governors to the Covid-19 pandemic? In this research note, we explore the determinants of implementing stay-at-home orders, focusing on governors’ characteristics. In our most conservative estimate, being a Democratic gov...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Leonardo Baccini
Countries
Civic capital and social distancing: evidence from the response to Covid-19 in Italy and Germany
Social distancing can succeed in slowing the spread of Covid-19 if citizens voluntary comply with it and internalize the cost of their mobility on others. How do civic values mediate this process? Using data on individual mobility across Italian prov...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ruben Durante
Stability of economic preferences in times of crisis
Economic preferences such as risk, time, and social preferences play an important role for a wide range of individual behavior and outcomes as well as aggregated economic variables (e.g. GDP growth, volume of trade between countries). While neoclassi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Daniel Engler
Countries
Housing market discrimination following the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China
Following the Covid-19 outbreak, there were frequent reports of discrimination against ethnic Asians across the world. Discrimination within countries often targeted individuals from the epicenters of the outbreak. We focus on the impacts of discrimi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ziming Liu
Countries
Restarting the economy while saving lives under Covid-19
We provide, calibrate and test a realistic model of the spread of SARS-Cov-2 in an economy where the population has different age groups and sectors. The model takes into account factors that have proved to be essential in explaining features of the ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Carlo Favero
Countries
Coronavirus perceptions and economic anxiety
We provide one of the first systematic assessments of the development and determinants of economic anxiety at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Using a global dataset on internet searches and two representative surveys from the US, we document a...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Thiemo Fetzer
Countries
