Current Research
Map 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 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
Covid-19 and disadvantage in New York City: a study using data from the Robin Hood and Columbia University poverty tracker and early childhood poverty tracker
Within two weeks, the Covid-19 pandemic drastically altered life in New York City, wreaking havoc on the personal and economic health of the City’s population. This study employs data from the Robin Hood and Columbia University Poverty Tracker and ...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Jane Waldfogel
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Sajid M. Chaudhry
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
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
Disasters and defaults
How does the risk of a disaster, such as a climate disaster or an epidemic, affect the default risk of a sovereign country and its ability to issue debt? To analyze this question, we introduce disaster risk into a small open economy model with endoge...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Prices & interest rates
Lead investigator: Toan Phan
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...
Primary Topic: Nations, regions & cities
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...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Abel Brodeur
Countries
Agile working in times of Covid-19
In times of Covid-19 crisis, encouraging Agile Working (AW) is a key global action adopted by governments and companies to protect workers in the workplace and to maintain economic and education systems’ activities during the quarantine. Studies bu...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Lead investigator: Massimo Miglioretti
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
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...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Silvia Mendolia
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
Food purchase behavior during Covid-19 pandemic
Covid-19 pandemic is increasingly a historical challenge that the world is called upon to face without prior preparation. In addition to an inevitable economic crisis due to the shutdown of many economic activities, the pandemic is causing important ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Rodolfo M. Nayga
Countries
Attitudes, behaviours and sources of information among social media users towards Covid-19: a cross-cultural explanatory study
Researchers, policymakers and societies alike are increasingly discussing the New Coronavirus situation. The European Commission, national governments and private foundations are investing large amounts of money for research, focusing on finding the ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Yash Chawla
Effect of Covid-19 and the enacted policy measures on individual travel behavior
Between August 2019 and January 2020, we carried out a large-scale tracking study involving 3,000 people in Switzerland. Participants were tracked using the GPS –based travel diary app “Catch my Day” for a total of 8 weeks based on a rolling re...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Beat Hintermann
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
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...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Valentin Klotzbucher
Countries
Macroeconomic effects of the Covid-19 supply shock: evidence from a global country sample and a GVAR model
Given that the Global Vector Autoregressive (GVAR) method, proposed by Pesaran et al. (2004), provides a practical approach to model the world economy, we study the effects on the macroeconomic determinants of a large number of economies around the g...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Nicholas Apergis
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
Showing life opportunities: Covid-19 rapid response survey
More than 1.5 billion students have to stay at home due to Covid-19 school closures, more than 90% of total enrolled learners (UNESCO, 04.01.2020). To ensure learning continuity, students have to study at home. However, it is unclear how the students...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Igor Asanov
Countries
