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Christina Boll, Till Nikolka 02 March 2021 The role of intergenerational contact in the spread of Covid-19 has been the subject of debate since the onset of the pandemic. This column uses survey and administrative data to explore the link between grandparental childcare and Covid-19 infection rates in Germany. The findings cast doubt on simplistic narratives that suggest a link between intergenerational contact and infection rates. The statistical significance of the positive relationship between the frequency of regular grandparental childcare and Covid infection rates breaks down as soon as potentially confounding factors, in particular the local Catholic population share, are controlled for. ....
Massimo Morelli The COVID-19 pandemic changed almost everything about the 2020 American elections. The Biden campaign made much of the federal failure to combat the disease. President Trump politicised the response, appearing to run against practices like mask-wearing that are designed to slow infections (Milosh et al. 2020). Campaign techniques changed dramatically, particularly on the Democratic side, with door-knocking and in-person rallies falling off and outreach moving to video and virtual realms. Polls showed that most Americans disapproved of President Trump’s response to COVID-19 – a 17-point chasm by election day. A cross-country analysis of polling data showed that governments that failed to contain COVID-19 infections suffered falling approval rates (Herrera et al. 2020). ....
Luca Di Gialleonardo, Mauro Marè, Antonello Motroni, Francesco Porcelli 04 February 2021 It was clear from early on in the Covid-19 pandemic that combatting it would require governments to monitor mass transit, schools, workplaces, and large public events. Less appreciated was the role played by social capital and family ties in the spread of the virus. This column provides an empirical analysis demonstrating a robust positive relationship between family ties and the contagion rate across the world. Death rates, by contrast, are not affected by family ties or other social factors, but by structural variables – from geography and GDP to median age and available hospital beds. ....
Paweł Kopiec The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted economists to provide timely insights and policy evaluations of the current situation. As a result, there has been growing interest in using alternative data that are collected and maintained primarily by private companies. Financial data from bank transactions, credit cards, and fintech apps have played a particularly crucial role because they keep track of the financial activities of many households. In the early stages of the pandemic, researchers were able to determine its economic impacts. They summarised their results in columns that include Andersen et al. (2020) for Denmark, Baker et al. (2020) for the US, Bounie et al. (2020) for France, Carvalho et al. (2020) for Spain, Chronopoulos et al. (2020) for the UK, and Watanabe (2020) for Japan. ....
Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered) have been a popular tool to analyse the diseases dynamics (Anderson et al. 2020, Atkeson et al. 2020). These models can be used to shed light on the impact of physical distancing and other public health measures in containing waves of infections (Aschwanden 2020, Ferguson et al. 2020, Davies et al. 2020). SIR models rely on several parameters (for instance, to quantify the impact of physical distancing on the reproduction rate of the virus, or R), so their insights are only as good as the accuracy of their parameters. By contrast, our study (Égert et al. 2020) contributes to a burgeoning literature that seeks to quantify the impact of government interventions on disease progression and mobility, employing reduced-form econometric estimates for the Covid-19 pandemic. This literature has already shown that stricter lockdown policies go in tandem with a reduction in Covid-19-related deaths (Conyon et al. 2020). It has found stron ....