Current Research
List viewEconomists 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-related school closures: impact on students in their final high school years
Students in their final high school years are faced with long lasting career decisions under high uncertainty and they are pressured to perform well in their high-stake exams. The government regulations following the Covid-19 pandemic such as school ...
Primary Topic: Schools, universities & training
Lead investigator: Malte Sandner
Countries
Effect of a federal paid sick leave mandate on physical mobility
Physical distancing is a vital non-pharmaceutical strategy to overcome the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) public health threat. The inability to take paid leave from work that cannot be conducted remotely is a crucial barrier to individuals bein...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Martin Anderson
Countries
Labor market flows and the Covid-19 economy
I examine labor market flows in the CPS through March 2020. Although there was a dramatic single month increase in the unemployment rate and exit rate from employment, most cyclical flows (hiring, employer-to-employer flows, quits) have not yet chang...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Eliza Forsythe
Countries
The global impact of Covid-19 on fintech adoption
We draw on mobile application data from 74 countries to document the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the adoption of digital finance and fintech. We estimate that the spread of Covid-19 and related government lockdowns have led to between a 22 an...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Jonathan Fu
Adoption of telework and e-learning during Covid-19 lockdown
This paper studies: a) the impact of Covid-19 lockdown measures on the adoption of teleworking and e-learning, and b) its socioeconomic determinants. Using real-time data on Google search Trends aggregated at the province level in Italy, I study how ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Marta C Lopes
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
Macroeconomic effects and spillovers among countries of the Covid-19 pandemic
Since December 2019, the Covid-19 pandemic spread worldwide from China, passing to Europe in February 2020, and lastly in the US, in March 2020. According to the Air Transport Association, in February 2020 the global growth rate of air passengers dem...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Francesco Simone Lucid
Pandemics meet democracy. experimental evidence from the Covid-19 crisis in Spain
The Covid-19 outbreak poses an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been so far extremely weak. All over the world government...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Francesc Amat
Countries
Polarization and public health: partisan differences in social distancing during the Coronavirus pandemic
We study partisan differences in Americans' response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Political leaders and media outlets on the right and left have sent divergent messages about the severity of the crisis, which could impact the extent to which Republ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Hunt Allcott
Countries
Belief change to market economy or planned economy? shock from Covid-19
Covid-19 has caused panic buying, temporary supply shortage and soaring prices. The Chinese government has formulated restrictive policies to guide the market order. We are curious whether the epidemic had an impact on the belief in the economic syst...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Naixi Liu
Countries
Containing the virus or reviving the economy? evidence from individual expectations during the Covid-19 epidemic
How does an epidemic affect individuals' expectation on economic prospects? We implement an incentivized longitudinal online survey with randomized controlled trials during the Covid-19 epidemic in China to answer this question. We find that low...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Keyang Li
Countries
Coronavirus disease 2019 and the global economy
Using daily data on the global coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) deaths, this paper investigates the corresponding effects on the global economic activity measured by the Baltic Exchange Dry Index (BDI). The empirical results based on a structural ...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Hakan Yilmazkuday
Coronavirus effects on the U.S. unemployment: evidence from Google trends
This paper investigates the relationship between Google search queries of "coronavirus" and "unemployment" using daily data from the United States. The investigation is achieved by employing a structural vector autoregression mode...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Hakan Yilmazkuday
Countries
Preferences and economic decision-making in the wake of Covid-19: experimental evidence from China
Using a large-scale experiment in China we study whether exposure to a major public health crisis affects the stability of economic preferences. We utilise a unique three-wave panel dataset of 539 students at Beijing Universities, collected in Octobe...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Paul Lohmann
Countries
Social cost with no political gain: the “Chinese virus” effect
Naming a contagious disease, such as Covid-19, by the geographic locality where the disease originates or starts, for example, Wuhan or China, may stigmatize specific ethnic groups related to that locality, and such stigmatizing behavior will further...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Yixin Liu
Countries
The early effects of coronavirus-related social distancing restrictions on brands
This paper presents some of the first evidence on the effect of the spread of coronavirus (Covid-19) in the US on retail footfall traffic. The paper uses granular visit data from cell-phone tracking to estimate the shift in visits to different types ...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Catherine E. Tucker
Countries
The responses of consumption and prices in Japan to the Covid-19 crisis and the Tohoku earthquake
This note compares the responses of consumption and prices to the Covid-19 shock and another large-scale natural disaster that hit Japan, the Tohoku earthquake in March 2011. The comparison shows that the responses of supermarket sales and prices at ...
Primary Topic: Lessons from history
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Tsutomu Watanabe
Countries
Analysis of websites regarding firms’ reactions to corona pandemic in Germany
We analyze websites of about 1.3 Mio. firms in Germany twice a week searching for the term Corona and synonyms of it. Since our first collection of data on March 19th, 2020, the share of firms mentioning the pandemic raised by two percentage points w...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Peter Winker
Countries
Staying home saves lives, really!
As coronavirus disease (Covid-19) is spreading around the world, many national and local governments have imposed social restrictive measures to limit the spread of the virus. Such quarantine measures in different cities across the world have brought...
Primary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Soheil Shayegh
Countries
The invisible risk: pandemics and the financial markets
Are pandemics systemically important to modern-day financial markets? This study uses the Covid-19 pandemic as a natural experiment for testing how large-scale pandemics affect the financial markets. Using hand-collected data at the firm level, I fin...
Primary Topic: Banks & financial markets
Lead investigator: Jordan Schoenfeld
Countries
