 Civic capital and social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic☆John Barrios, Efraim Benmelech, Yael V. Hochberg, Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales Journal of Public Economics, 2021, vol. 193, issue C Abstract: Using mobile phone and survey data, we show that during the early phases of COVID-19, voluntary social distancing was greater in areas with higher civic capital and amongst individuals exhibiting a higher sense of civic duty. This effect is robust to including controls for political ideology, income, age, education, and other local-level characteristics. This result is present for U.S. individuals and U.S. counties as well as European regions. Moreover, we show that after U.S. states began re-opening, high civic capital counties maintained a more sustained level of social distancing, while low civic capital counties did not. Finally, we show that U.S. individuals report a higher tendency to use protective face masks in high civic capital counties. Our evidence points to the importance of considering the level of civic capital in designing public policies not only in response to pandemics, but also more generally. Keywords: COVID-19; Social distancing; Civic capital; Social capital; Compliance (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:193:y:2021:i:c:s0047272720301742 DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2020.104310 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Public Economics is currently edited by R. Boadway and J. Poterba More articles in Journal of Public Economics from Elsevier |
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