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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.

Covid-19: measuring the effects of Covid-19 on businesses and the UK economy

This application addresses two of the key objectives of this grant scheme by a) gathering critical data on the business response to Covid-19 quickly for immediate policy and future research use, b) providing new research with a clear impact pathway t...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Paul Mizen
Countries

The geography of post Covid-19 shutdown recovery risk in UK economic activity. implications for recovery inequality and targeted stimulus

The Covid-19 shutdown is not affecting all parts of the UK equally. Economic activity in local consumer service industries (LCSI), such as retail outlets, restaurants, hairdressers, or gardeners has all but stopped; other industries are less affected...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Jesse Matheson
Countries

My home is my castle – the benefits of working from home during a pandemic crisis: evidence from Germany

This paper studies the relation between work and public health during the Covid-19 pandemic in Germany. Combining administrative data on SARS-CoV-2 infections and short-time work registrations, firm- and worker-level surveys and cell phone tracking d...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Jean-Victor Alipour
Countries

Families under confinement: Covid-19, domestic violence, and alcohol consumption

Evidence suggests that during the Covid-19 lockdown, alcohol consumption has increased and income has gone down among several households in Mexico City. The existing literature relates alcohol consumption and negative income shocks to a greater numbe...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Countries

Community health care and Covid-19 pandemic: experimental evidence from Uganda

The limited capacity of the health systems in many low-income countries, especially in rural areas, suggests that the rapid spreading of the Covid-19 virus could have huge consequences in those areas. On top of the direct impact of the virus, a growi...
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Martina Bjorkman-Nyqvist
Countries

Improving task completion by school principals during the Covid-19 crisis

We study whether neutral, positive, or negative reinforcement messages given to schools’ principals can improve their bureaucratic efficiency in times of crisis. Under the Covid-19 health emergency urgency, the Ministry of Education asked all schoo...
Lead investigator: Daniel Morales
Countries

How much of China and world GDP has the Coronavirus reduced?

Using a network approach, we estimate the output loss due to the lockdown of the Hubei province triggered by the coronavirus disease (Covid-19). Based on our most conservative estimate, China suffers about 4% loss of output from labor loss, and globa...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Shaowen Luo
Countries

How effective are social distancing policies? evidence on the fight against Covid-19 from Germany

To fight the spread of Covid-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Ulrich Glogowsky
Countries

Are palliative cash transfers effective to counteract the effects of stay-at-home orders? evidence from Peru

Several governments in LAC are increasingly imposing mandatory quarantines for all citizens to contain the expansion of the Covid-19 pandemic. These measures have proved to be the most effective to flatten the curve, but their downside are the econom...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Matthew Bird
Countries

Covid-19, lockdown and health: the role of air pollution

This paper studies the impact of a prefecture’s lockdown measure in China (Out-side Hubei province), in response to the outbreak of Covid-19, on its air pollution and Covid-19 related health outcomes. In doing that, we use a difference-in-differenc...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Linyuan Huang
Countries

Debt sharing after Covid-19: how the direct involvement of EU institutions impacts the recovery path of a member state.

The substantial risk to public health posed by the emergence of Covid-19 has resulted in many European Governments taking unprecedented action to arrest the spread of the virus. Administrative closures across a number of economies has resulted in a c...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Kieran McQuinn
Countries

Effect of Coronavirus on bank loans and credit rationing in an emerging market economy

Amid the outbreak of Covid-19, there have been a number of initiatives to keep businesses afloat. In this study, we aim to explore how the supply side, particularly the banking sector, responded to this shock by using highly granular Colombian loan-l...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Yasin Kürşat Önder
Countries

Epidemics, trade and containment policies

The unprecedented spread of Covid-19 has severely disrupted the global economy. This project intends to incorporate the canonical epidemiology mechanism into a two-country dynamic Melitz model to investigate quantitatively how health shock affects th...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Lead investigator: Kang Shi
Countries