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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.

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

Parental job loss and job insecurity during the Covid-19 pandemic and children’s outcomes

The aim of this research is to study how job loss and felt job insecurity due to the Covid19 pandemic are impacting factors that directly affect the cognitive and non-cognitive achievement of children: parental mental and physical health, income, tim...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Jenifer Ruiz-Valenzuela
Countries

Listening to young lives at work: impact of the global coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic on young people in Ethiopia, India, Peru and Vietnam

The survey aims to answer questions about impact of the pandemic, policies to contain the spread of the virus, and the subsequent economic slowdown in four developing countries. Building on almost twenty years of the project, the survey will examine ...
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Marta Favara

Willingness to get tested for Covid-19 antibodies: impact of prices, strength, and duration of protective immunity

We study willingness to get privately tested for Coronavirus (Covid-19) antibodies as well as willingness to pay (WTP) for these tests. Subjects trade off future access to private antibody tests against monetary payments. We measure WTP on a represen...
Lead investigator: Marta Serra Garcia
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 short- and long-term consequences of Covid-19 on gender equality

The Covid-19 crisis has substantially affected the organisation of work in the labor market and in the household. In particular, with the start of the lock-down, virtually none of the typical components of home production can be outsourced to the mar...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Claudia Hupkau
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

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...
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...
Lead investigator: Ole Christian Wasenden
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consumers' mobility, expenditure and online- offline substitution response to Covid-19: evidence from French transaction data

This paper investigates a number of general phenomena connected with consumer behaviour in response to a severe economic shock, using billions of French card transactions measured before and during the Covid-19 epidemic. We examine changes in consume...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: David Bounie
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

The effects of Covid-19 on the gender gap in academic research productivity

The rapid spread of the new coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic and the subsequent counter-measures, such as school closures, shift to working from home, and social distancing are disrupting economic activity around the world. As with other major economi...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Tatyana Deryugina

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