Closed for business

Wolf Wagner, Dion Bongaerts and Francesco Mazzola

No 14814, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We investigate the effectiveness of business shutdowns to contain the Covid-19 disease. In March 2020, Italy shut down operations in a number of sectors. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that municipalities with higher exposure to closed sectors experience subsequently lower mortality rates. We estimate the resulting life savings to exceed 12.000 people over less than a month. Using estimates of remaining life-years, this translates into monetary benefits of 12 billion Euros We also show that business shutdowns exhibit rapidly diminishing returns and have effects outside the closed sectors and in other municipalities. This suggests that effective containment policies require central coordination.

Keywords: Pandemic; Covid-19; Business shutdown; Coordination (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14814 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14814

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14814

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().