Income gradient of pharmaceutical panic buying at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic

Péter Elek, Anikó Bíró and Petra Fadgyas-Freyler

No 2113, CERS-IE WORKING PAPERS from Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

Abstract: We analyse the timing, magnitude and income dependence of pharmaceutical panic buying around the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Hungary. We use district-level monthly and daily administrative data on detailed categories of pharmaceutical purchases, merge them to income statistics and estimate multilevel panel models. Our main results are as follows. First, the days of therapy (DOT) of pharmaceutical purchases increased by more than 30% in March 2020, when major lockdown measures were announced. This pattern holds for almost all categories of pharmaceuticals. Second, shortly after the panic reactions, the aggregate amount of pharmaceutical purchases returned to their pre-shock levels, however, the frequency of pharmacy visits decreased. Third, the panic buying reaction was significantly stronger in richer geographical areas, where – according to the daily data – people also reacted earlier to the pandemic-related news. Overall, the results suggest that panic buying of pharmaceuticals can have dtrimental effects on vulnerable populations.We combine macro-level data on high-stakes testing with survey data on more than 300,000 students aged 10-16 years in 31 European countries, from three waves (2002, 2006 and 2010) of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study. With variation in high-stakes testing across countries, years and grade levels, we use a quasi-experimental difference-in-differences (DD) design for identification of causal effects. We find that high-stakes testing increases self-reported school-related stress by almost 10 % of a standard deviation. This is primarily driven by a strong effect for girls, meaning that high-stakes testing increases the gender gap in school-related stress. The results are robust to a range of sensitivity analyses.

Keywords: COVID-19; inequality; panic buying; pharmaceutical demand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa, nep-eur, nep-hea and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Journal Article: Income gradient of pharmaceutical panic buying at the outbreak of the COVID‐19 pandemic (2021)
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