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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.

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

Grey rhinos in financial markets and venue selection: the case of Covid-19

We investigate the effects of the Covid-19-induced shock in financial markets on aggregate venue selection/market share and market quality. We find that the shock is linked with an economically significant loss of market share by dark pools to lit ex...
Primary Topic: Banks & financial markets
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Gbenga Ibikunle

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. (...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Luigino Bruni
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

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

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 ...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Carlo Favero
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

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

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...
Lead investigator: Ruben Durante
Countries

Social distancing and pro-sociality in times of acute sanitary crisis

The health crisis generated by the Covid-19 disease, which is rapidly spreading worldwide through direct human contact, has called for strict measures to limit contagion that drastically reduce social interactions. We study whether the imposed confin...
Lead investigator: Fortuna Casoria
Countries

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

Risk and time preferences under the lockdown

There exist increasing evidence that human preferences—including risk and time attitudes—change across contexts (Bowles, 1998; Barseghyan et al., 2011; Wolbert and Riedl, 2013; Wang et al., 2016). Since measuring preferences consistently over tim...
Lead investigator: Pablo Branas-Garza
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

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

Asset price expectations during the financial crash of the Covid-19 pandemic

We measure daily price expectations about the share prices of six well-known publicly traded companies in the U.S. in an incentivized online experiment for a period of three months. Coincidentally, our experiment started on 19/02/2020, just one day b...
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Carlos Cueva
Countries

Covid-19 and investor behavior

In the beginning of January 2020, the Chinese authorities identified a novel type of the coronavirus, which rapidly spread from China all over the world. The World Health Organization characterized the spread of the novel coronavirus officially as a ...
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Regina Ortmann
Countries

What are the effects of the Covid-19 crisis on labor demand? an analysis using job board data from Austria

In this project, we examine to what extent labor demand, measured in terms of vacancy postings, has changed during the crisis. Using data on various job characteristics, we analyze what type of jobs are most affected. These characteristics include oc...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Omar Bamieh
Countries

Locked-down in a welfare state: visible costs and hidden gains

I exploit the variation related to lock-down measures put in place in Italy (March 9, 2020) and Norway (March 12, 2020), to estimate the aggregate net costs for the government budget from unemployment insurance (defined as the most important building...
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Roberto Iacono
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