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.
Measuring risk and time preferences during the emergence of the Covid-19 crisis
We measure risk and time preferences, and examine the relationship with the disposition effect. Firstly, to estimate preferences, we use and compare several well-known quantitative and qualitative methods. Our main specification is an extended versio...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Pensions, savings & investment
Lead investigator: Jorgo T.G. Goossens
Countries
Political partisanship influences behavioral responses to governors' recommendations for Covid-19 prevention in the United States
Voluntary physical distancing is essential for preventing the spread of Covid-19. Political partisanship may influence individuals' responsiveness to recommendations from political leaders. Daily mobility during March 2020 was measured using loc...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Guy Grossman
Countries
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
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
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
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
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
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
Covid-19 pandemic, public attention, and policy responses
Despite all countries being affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, the government's' responses have varied extensively in terms of speed, policy content, as well as the level of compulsion. We explore to what extent differences in the timing of...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Cevat Giray Aksoy
More than words: leaders’ speech and risky behavior during a pandemic
How do political leader’s words and actions affect people’s behavior? We address this question in the context of Brazil by combining electoral data and geo-localized mobile phone data for more than 60 million devices throughout the entire country...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Nicolas Ajzenman
Countries
Birds of a feather lockdown together: mutual bird-human benefits during a global pandemic
Feeding backyard wildlife has impure public good characteristics – it can satisfy specific human motivations whilst also improving bird populations. We document a surge in human interest in connecting with wild birds during lockdowns to address the...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Michael Brock
Volatility shocks and investment behavior
We investigate how volatility shocks influence investments into a risky asset, perceptions about the asset’s risk, its future price/return development, and investor satisfaction. We run investment experiments mimicking volatility shocks with two su...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Christoph Huber
Countries
Compulsory face mask policies do not affect community mobility in Germany
There is currently a heated debate about making face masks compulsory in public spaces to contain Covid-19. A key concern is that such policies could lead to risk compensating behaviour and thereby undermine efforts to maintain social distancing and ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Roxanne Kovacs
Countries
The economic effects of Covid-19 containment measures
Many countries around the world have implemented stringent containment measures to halt the spread of the 2019 coronavirus disease (Covid-19) and limit the number of fatalities. Though crucial to slow the course of the pandemic, these measures entail...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Pragyan Deb
Measuring social distancing: an empirical analysis using geo-location data from smartphones
This research project uses anonymized geo-location data from 60 million mobile phone users in Brazil to quantify the impact of coronavirus lockdown measures on social distancing. The results confirm that the current share of the population staying ho...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Tharcisio Leon
Countries
Covid-19, the stability of preferences and environmental choices
Recent studies and surveys show that Covid-19 not only poses a threat to individuals’ physical health, but also threatens individuals’ mental health due to income and employment losses, changes in daily routines and the general increased fear and...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Andreas Loschel
Countries
The implicit health-money trade-off in Covid-19 pandemic
The strategies to manage Covid-19 pandemic involve a challenging trade-off for policy-makers. On one hand, the closure of all non-essential economic activities (lockdown) helps to reduce the diffusion of the epidemic. On the other hand, lockdown come...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Vincenzo Carrieri
Countries
Trust in experts during an epidemic
Trust in science and experts is extremely important in times of epidemics to ensure compliance with public health measures. Yet little is known about how this trust evolves while an epidemic is underway. Understanding these processes is vital for pol...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Pietro Battiston
Countries
