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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.

Well-being, religious beliefs and virtual relations at the time of Covid-19 lockdown

Covid-19 social distancing and lockdown are affecting individual lifestyles. We created a socio-economic survey addressed to a representative sample of the Italian (N=1,000) and US (N=1,400) population, focusing on three aspects of this phenomenon. (...
Lead investigator: Luigino Bruni
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...
Lead investigator: Alexander W. Cappelen
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...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Dirk Foremny
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...
Lead investigator: Marko Korhonen
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...
Lead investigator: Thiemo Fetzer
Countries

The impact of Covid-19 on violence against women and children in Germany

To contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly a quarter of the world’s population is currently under lockdown or practicing physical distancing. These measures may have inadvertent consequences. In this project, we study the implications o...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Cara Ebert
Countries

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...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Daniel Engler
Countries

Our relationship with food during the Covid-19 pandemic

It has been clear for many years that policies and strategies are needed to transform towards more sustainable food systems. Now during the Covid-19 pandemic, food production, processing and distribution systems have been put under severe pressure. A...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Jeremy Millard

The youth and Covid-19: how to communicate effectively the emergency

At the beginning of the spread of Covid-19 in Italy, before the introduction of the lockdown “stay at home” measures in the whole country, in order to slow the rate of infection, the Government pushed for self-imposed measures of social distance ...
Lead investigator: Vincenzo Carrieri
Countries

Epidemic spreads of Covid-19 narratives and their effect on financial phenomena.

We identify and retrieve the most salient Covid-19 narratives and their evolution over time via text mining on daily open-ended questionnaires sent to US stockholders since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. This data is complemented with over 3...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Daniel Borup
Countries

Risk taking during a global crisis: evidence from Wuhan

We conducted a repeated survey on risk taking behavior across a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China – ground zero of the Coronavirus pandemic – before and after the outbreak began. Our baseline survey was administered on October 16th, 2019 among gr...
Lead investigator: Di Bu
Countries

Expectations and behavior of firms in response to the Covid-19 pandemic

In March 2020, the German government implemented measures in response to the COVID19 pandemic that effectively led to a shutdown of a significant share of the economy. We study how firms adjusted to the ensuing crisis along different margins, includi...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Sebastian Link
Countries

The causal influence of information about Covid-19 on laypersons trust in government, perception of their living conditions, and economic expectations

The current Covid-19 crisis has profound effects around the world. A potentially important factor for the perception of the crisis by laypersons appears to be the specific type of information they receive. Focusing on two emerging markets, Thailand a...
Lead investigator: Bernd Hayo
Countries

Compliance with Covid-19 social-distancing measures in Italy: the role of expectations and duration

We study how intentions to comply with the self-isolation restrictions introduced in Italy to mitigate the Covid-19 epidemic respond to the length of their possible extension. Based on a survey of a representative sample of Italian residents (N=894),...
Lead investigator: Guglielmo Briscese
Countries

Labor market outcomes and time use during the Coronavirus outbreak

This project will study labor market outcomes and time use by US households during the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak. We are particularly interested in the effect of the outbreak on three interrelated areas. First, how did the outbreak impact labor marke...
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Alexander Bick
Countries

Political polarization, social fragmentation, and cooperation during a pandemic

We study the impact of political polarization on the willingness of people to comply with social distancing directives during the Covid-19 pandemic. We find a reduced compliance with these measures when the state governor differs from the preferred p...
Lead investigator: Boriana Miloucheva
Countries

Covid-19 and small firms: expectations, relief take-up and firm dynamics

Many small businesses have already been deeply affected by the Covid-19 crisis, leading them to lay off employees, temporarily close shop, or go out of business completely. In response, governments have passed specific provisions to help support smal...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: John Eric Humphries
Countries

Income and wealth shocks and expectations during the Covid-19 pandemic

In early April 2020 we conducted a survey on a representative sample of more than 8,000 US households to study the effect of the coronavirus crisis on household income and retirement wealth, households' expectations about the recovery, and the i...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Tobin Hanspal
Countries

Labour supply in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic: empirical evidence on hours, home office, and expectations

Using a survey module administered in late March 2020, we analyze how working hours change under the social distancing regulations enacted to fight the Covid-19 pandemic. We study the Netherlands, which are a prototypical Western European country, bo...
Lead investigator: Hans-Martin von Gaudecker
Countries

Measuring risk and time preferences during the emergence of the Covid-19 crisis

We measure risk and time preferences, and examine the relationship with the disposition effect. Firstly, to estimate preferences, we use and compare several well-known quantitative and qualitative methods. Our main specification is an extended versio...
Lead investigator: Jorgo T.G. Goossens
Countries