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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.

Disparate impacts of Covid-19 lockdowns in Pakistan affecting girls and rural
residents

In this article, we examine the feasibility of working and studying from home in Pakistan. We take advantage of the 2018–19 Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) Survey, released only weeks ago. PSLM is a nationally representative...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Syed Hasan
Countries

Ownership and business resilience during a pandemic

Exploring how financial markets fare during the Covid-19 crisis, scholars have begun to probe into organizational factors at the firm level in order to understand the different response by companies. Our key goal is to test whether the involvement of...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Mario Daniele Amore
Countries

The effects of working from home on Covid-19 infections and production – a macroeconomic analysis for Germany

We study the impact of confinement on infection risk and on the German economy. We first document that regions whose industry structure allows for a large fraction of work to be done at home also experienced much fewer Covid-19 cases and fatalities. ...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Harald Fadinger
Countries

Be kind: domestic violence and mental health during a strict Covid-19 lockdown

The proposed study is going to exploit timing of a nationwide Covid-19 lockdown to estimate the impacts of social distancing on domestic violence incidents and mental health referrals using administrative data in New Zealand. To estimate local averag...
Secondary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Kabir Dasgupta
Countries

Cross-country economic policy response to Covid-19

With the Covid-19 is still spreading at a rapid pace, the social distancing measures and economic policy response to Covid-19 varies a great deal across countries. For example, Germany’s response to the Covid-19 is very aggressive compared to Swede...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Sajid M. Chaudhry

The short and long run impact of the “great lockdown”: lessons from Italy

This project aims to assess the impact of school and economic lockdowns on short-run outcomes (the spread of the Covid-19 pandemics) and on medium and long-run ones (effect on economic outcomes and school performance) by exploiting heterogeneity in t...
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Nicola Borri
Countries

The effect of shelter-in-place orders on domestic violence

As the coronavirus spreads across the United States, many states have enacted shelter-in-place orders to limit the growth of the pandemic. While these policies are designed to benefit public health, they may have harmful effects upon household welfar...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Jeremy A. Cook
Countries

Infectious diseases, social distancing and firm dynamics

In this project, we study the economic costs and trade-offs associated to the mitigation measures of social distancing intended to counteract the spread of an epidemic disease. To do so, we introduce the SIR model of epidemic progression in an otherw...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Andrea Chiavari
Countries

Do stock markets play a role in determining the Covid-19 economic stimulus? A cross-country analysis

This paper makes an innovative contribution to the literature by analyzing the determinants of the Covid-19 economic stimulus. In particular, we explore whether the stock market fall observed due to the coronavirus pandemic in many countries around t...
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Sajid M. Chaudhry

Covid-19 and conflict

What does Covid-19, and more specifically national responses to the pandemic, mean for inter-group conflict worldwide? We start by drawing an important distinction between interpersonal conflict (including, e.g., domestic violence) and inter-group co...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Jeffrey R. Bloem

Heterogeneous consumption and income responses during the Covid-19 crisis

This project aims to examine the distributional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic using the Singapore Life Panel (SLP), a unique monthly panel dataset which contains detailed information on income, consumption and wealth for a representative samp...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Jing Li
Countries

Multinationals and Covid-19

The number of world-wide multinational subsidiaries has been increasing in every half-year interval since mid-2016 2. But it has declined from 12/31/2019 to 04/13/2020. This is largely accounted for by low entry rates. 3. Similar pattern for US-paren...
Secondary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Lead investigator: Ziho Park

The short-term effect of Covid-19 on employment and wages

In this ongoing project, we examine the short-term consequences of Covid-19 on employment and wages in the united states. Guided by a pre-analysis plan, we document the impact of Covid-19 at the national-level using a simple difference and test wheth...
Lead investigator: Abel Brodeur
Countries

Determinants of the community mobility during the Covid-19 epidemic: the role of government regulations and information

As countries around the world are adopting drastic social distancing measures to slow down the spread of the novel coronavirus (Covid-19), the question of an optimal balance between the benefits and costs of these policies has received a lot of atten...
Lead investigator: Silvia Mendolia

Lost in lockdown? the effect of social distancing and quarantine policies on depression and suicide in Germany

We exploit spatial and temporal variation in mitigation policies to assess how social-distancing and quarantine policies imposed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany affect anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Our empirical approach...
Lead investigator: Valentin Klotzbucher
Countries

Safe matching and labor reallocation

The recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic will involve a major reallocation of labour across jobs. A large number of jobs involving personal contacts with customers or colleagues are likely to be shut down for a long period of time unless they can be d...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Gaetano Basso
Countries

When school closes, dad works and mum stays home?

What is the division of child care between mothers and fathers, and how does this division affect labor supply? The spread of Covid-19 has led to temporary closures of childcare facilities and schools in many countries. This is particularly challengi...
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Omar Bamieh
Countries

Interlinkages between sustainable development goals and Covid related disaster risk

We identify the key interlinkages (trade-offs and synergies) between the Sustainable Development Goals and the Sendai framework for Covid related disaster risk to analyze the impact of these SDG interlinkages in responding effectively to the Covid-19...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
Lead investigator: Ranjula Bali Swain

Labor market policies during a pandemic

Many countries have introduced lockdowns to fight Covid-19, which has required the shuttering of many businesses and dramatically increased unemployment. We study the interaction of lockdowns and employment support programs in an epidemiological SEIR...
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Andrew Glover
Countries

Covid disruptions and resilience of retail food prices around the world

This project will use new price indexes to conduct nearly real-time monitoring of retail prices by food group and nutrient composition, measuring month-to-month changes in the cost and affordability of nutritious diets in various countries around the...
Primary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: William A. Masters