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.
Well-being, religious beliefs and virtual relations at the time of Covid-19 lockdown
Covid-19 social distancing and lockdown are affecting individual lifestyles. We created a socio-economic survey addressed to a representative sample of the Italian (N=1,000) and US (N=1,400) population, focusing on three aspects of this phenomenon. (...
Primary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Secondary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Luigino Bruni
Changes in preferences due to Covid-19: a longitudinal study from the northern Finland birth cohorts
Remarkable events such as large pandemics (Covid-19) can presumably cause changes in people’s preferences, e.g. in their attitudes towards risk-taking and trust. These effects can be permanent, or at least persist for a long time. We explore the ef...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Marko Korhonen
Countries
Living at the peak: health and public finance during the Covid-19 pandemic
This paper provides novel evidence for the determinants of preferences for public health and the willingness to pay for health services using a survey experiment implemented during the third week of the lock-down in Spain. At the time of our experime...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Dirk Foremny
Countries
Civic capital and social distancing: evidence from the response to Covid-19 in Italy and Germany
Social distancing can succeed in slowing the spread of Covid-19 if citizens voluntary comply with it and internalize the cost of their mobility on others. How do civic values mediate this process? Using data on individual mobility across Italian prov...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ruben Durante
The impact of Covid-19 on violence against women and children in Germany
To contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, nearly a quarter of the world’s population is currently under lockdown or practicing physical distancing. These measures may have inadvertent consequences. In this project, we study the implications o...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Cara Ebert
Countries
Stability of economic preferences in times of crisis
Economic preferences such as risk, time, and social preferences play an important role for a wide range of individual behavior and outcomes as well as aggregated economic variables (e.g. GDP growth, volume of trade between countries). While neoclassi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Daniel Engler
Countries
Coronavirus perceptions and economic anxiety
We provide one of the first systematic assessments of the development and determinants of economic anxiety at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Using a global dataset on internet searches and two representative surveys from the US, we document a...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Thiemo Fetzer
Countries
Housing market discrimination following the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China
Following the Covid-19 outbreak, there were frequent reports of discrimination against ethnic Asians across the world. Discrimination within countries often targeted individuals from the epicenters of the outbreak. We focus on the impacts of discrimi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Ziming Liu
Countries
The impact of Covid-19 lockdown on employment and mental health
Enforcing social distancing via economy-wide lockdown is considered as an effective measure to prevent transmission of the novel coronavirus Covid-19. Consequently, accompanied by a large number of job losses, a lockdown has severe labor market and e...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Health, physical & mental
Lead investigator: Kabir Dasgupta
Countries
Our relationship with food during the Covid-19 pandemic
It has been clear for many years that policies and strategies are needed to transform towards more sustainable food systems. Now during the Covid-19 pandemic, food production, processing and distribution systems have been put under severe pressure. A...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Jeremy Millard
The youth and Covid-19: how to communicate effectively the emergency
At the beginning of the spread of Covid-19 in Italy, before the introduction of the lockdown “stay at home” measures in the whole country, in order to slow the rate of infection, the Government pushed for self-imposed measures of social distance ...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Vincenzo Carrieri
Countries
Social distancing and pro-sociality in times of acute sanitary crisis
The health crisis generated by the Covid-19 disease, which is rapidly spreading worldwide through direct human contact, has called for strict measures to limit contagion that drastically reduce social interactions. We study whether the imposed confin...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Fortuna Casoria
Countries
Risk and time preferences under the lockdown
There exist increasing evidence that human preferences—including risk and time attitudes—change across contexts (Bowles, 1998; Barseghyan et al., 2011; Wolbert and Riedl, 2013; Wang et al., 2016). Since measuring preferences consistently over tim...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Pablo Branas-Garza
Countries
Risk taking during a global crisis: evidence from Wuhan
We conducted a repeated survey on risk taking behavior across a panel of subjects in Wuhan, China – ground zero of the Coronavirus pandemic – before and after the outbreak began. Our baseline survey was administered on October 16th, 2019 among gr...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Di Bu
Countries
Compliance with Covid-19 social-distancing measures in Italy: the role of expectations and duration
We study how intentions to comply with the self-isolation restrictions introduced in Italy to mitigate the Covid-19 epidemic respond to the length of their possible extension. Based on a survey of a representative sample of Italian residents (N=894),...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Guglielmo Briscese
Countries
The causal influence of information about Covid-19 on laypersons trust in government, perception of their living conditions, and economic expectations
The current Covid-19 crisis has profound effects around the world. A potentially important factor for the perception of the crisis by laypersons appears to be the specific type of information they receive. Focusing on two emerging markets, Thailand a...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Bernd Hayo
Social distancing, internet access and inequality
We use data provided by Safegraph for the purposes of studying the spread of Covid-19 during February, March 2020 and the first week of April 2020. This data is derived from a panel of around 19 million devices that collect anonymous location data. E...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Lesley Chiou
Countries
Labor market outcomes and time use during the Coronavirus outbreak
This project will study labor market outcomes and time use by US households during the 2020 Coronavirus outbreak. We are particularly interested in the effect of the outbreak on three interrelated areas. First, how did the outbreak impact labor marke...
Primary Topic: Jobs, work, pay & benefits
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Alexander Bick
Countries
Rationing social contact during the Covid-19 pandemic: transmission risk and social benefits of US locations
To prevent the spread of Covid-19, some types of stores and gathering places have been shut down while others remain open. The decision to shut down one type of location and leave another open constitutes a judgement about the relative danger and ben...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Seth Benzell
Countries
Political beliefs affect compliance with Covid-19 social distancing orders
Social distancing is vital to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus. We use geolocation data to document that political beliefs present a significant limitation to the effectiveness of state-level social distancing orders. Residents in Republi...
Primary Topic: Attitudes, media & governance
Lead investigator: Marcus Painter
Countries
