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.
Tracking the Covid-19 crisis with high-resolution transaction data
Financial and payments systems throughout the world generate a vast amount of naturally occurring, and digitally recorded, transaction data, but national statistical agencies mainly rely on surveys of much smaller scale for constructing official econ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Vasco M. Carvalho
Countries
Economic narratives and policy ppinions: a survey experiment on Covid-19 stories
Narratives may impact people’s beliefs on relevant policy issues, and political context may mediate these effects. Indeed, some specific contexts may be more easily swayed by certain stories that provide explanations for current social and economic...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Armenak Antinyan
Countries
Where does work belong anymore? The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on working in the UK
The Covid-19 outbreak has forced companies to embrace home-based working (HBW) at such speed that they have had little opportunity to consider the impact on their workers. It can be argued that the crisis has led to the most significant, intensive so...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Abigail Marks
Countries
Helping families help themselves during stay-at-home orders: effects of a mobile phone intervention to address child maltreatment and violent parent-child Interactions
Lockdown measures imposed throughout the world to contain the spread of the Covid-19 have drastically changed household dynamics. The stay-at-home orders, together with the temporary closure of schools and the change to virtual education schemes, hav...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Sofia Amaral
Countries
Attitudes towards debt in corporate decision-making: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
We study the e?ect of an entrepreneur’s attitude towards debt on the financial policies of the businesses they run. Using a survey of 1,009 Finnish SMEs, we test whether a manager’s attitude towards debt affects their likelihood of using debt-bas...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Mikael Paaso
Countries
The effects of emergency government cash transfers on beliefs and behaviours during the Covid pandemic: evidence from Brazil
This project aims to evaluate the impact of emergency cash transfers on workers’ beliefs about the coronavirus. It focused on the impacts of ‘Auxilio Emergencial’, a cash grant provided to low-income households in response to income falls cause...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Fernanda Leite Lopez de Leon
Countries
Small business under the Covid-19 crisis: expected short- and medium-run effects of anti-contagion and economic policies
During the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) crisis, governments around the world have implemented large-scale anti-contagion policies to contain the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in combination with a series of economic policies to mitigate the econom...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Kohei Kawaguchi
Countries
Building resilience during the pandemic: evidence from a cash transfer program in Bolivia
Exploiting the context of a large-scale, untargeted, non- contributory pension program in bolivia, we study the short-term effects of cash transfers on household resilience during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. We compare households that became ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Nicolas Bottan
Countries
Impacts of Covid-19 on rural households in Bangladesh
The Asian Development Bank Institute (ADBI) is conducting a survey of rural households in Bangladesh to better understand Covid-19’s impacts on vulnerable people and guide the development of policy responses that improve social protection. This pho...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Peter Morgan
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 on small business employment and hours: real-time estimates with homebase data
We use worker-firm matched data from Homebase to construct new real-time estimates of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on employment and hours worked of small businesses. We find four key results: (1) employment of small businesses in four of the ...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Business, big & small
Lead investigator: Andre Kurmann
Countries
The impact of lockdowns on socio-economic attitudes
We examine the immediate impact of the nationwide lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic on the socio-economic attitudes of our societies. Before and after the enforcement of lockdowns, we conducted large-scale surveys with 20,000 individuals in four...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Kerim Peren Arin
Corona, lockdown, local GDP and Individual well-being: a comparison of regions in New Zealand with machine learning forecasts
We study the impact of local economic prospects on the well-being of individuals in reaction to the Corona lockdown and thereafter. We expect that well-being is positively affected by the economic outlook in the local region, as approximated via AI-b...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Nora Szech
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...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Jean-Victor Alipour
Countries
Assessing inequality in the school closure response to Covid-19
The spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) has caused school closures in more than 190 countries, affecting over 90% of the world’s student population. School closures can widen learning inequalities and disproportionately hurt vulnerable st...
Primary Topic: Schools, universities & training
Lead investigator: Xiqian Cai
Countries
Social response to early-stage government control measures of Covid-19 in Colombia: population survey, April 8-20 2020
On Monday, March 16, 2020, the government of Colombia announced actions to control Covid-19. These recommendations directly affected the entire population and included: reducing physical contact; reducing mobility and cancelling unnecessary travel; w...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Juan Carlos Rivillas-García
Countries
Moral suasion and the private provision of public goods: evidence from the Covid-19 pandemic
We study how moral suasion that appeals to two major ethical theories, Consequentialism and Deontology, affects individual intentions to contribute to a public good. We use the Covid-19 pandemic as an exemplary case where there is a large gap between...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Moritz A. Drupp
Countries
Trust in the healthcare system and Covid-19 treatment in the developing world – survey and experimental evidence from Armenia.
Covid-19 continues to spread across the globe at an exponential speed, infecting millions and overwhelming even the most prepared healthcare systems. Concerns are looming that the healthcare systems in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are mos...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Armenak Antinyan
Countries
Sustaining pro-social and environmental behaviours beyond Covid-19
Covid-19 has triggered a global economic shutdown, leading to unintended reductions in carbon emissions and other pollutants as a result of decreased travel and consumption. Although a global pandemic that has caused close to 400,000 deaths at time o...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Energy & climate change
Lead investigator: Roger Fouquet
Countries
The idiosyncratic impact of an aggregate shock: the distributional consequences of Covid-19
Using new data from the Understanding Society: Covid-19 survey collected in April 2020, we show how the aggregate shock caused by the pandemic affects individuals across the distribution in the UK. The survey collects data from existing members of th...
Primary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Secondary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Michaela Benzeval
Countries
The economic effects of Covid-19 and credit constraints: evidence from Italian firms' expectations and plans
We investigate the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic and the role played by credit constraints in the transmission mechanism, using a novel survey of expectations and plans of Italian firms, taken just before and after the outbreak. Most firm...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Pierluigi Balduzzi
Countries
