The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay-At-Home Policies

Ola Andersson, Pol Campos-Mercade, Fredrik Carlsson, Florian Schneider and Erik Wengström

No 2020:9, Working Papers from Lund University, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and representative sample of the Swedish population. The results suggest that the welfare cost of a one-month stay-at-home policy, restricting non-working hours away from home, amounts to 9.1 percent of Sweden's monthly GDP. The cost can be interpreted as 29,600 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), which roughly corresponds to between 3,700 and 8,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Moreover, we find that stricter and longer lockdowns are disproportionately more costly than more lenient ones. This result indicates that strict stay-at-home policies are likely to be cost-effective only if they slow the spread of the disease much more than more lenient ones.

Keywords: Stay-at-home orders; welfare effects; choice experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-05-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/194581696/WP20_9 Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: THE INDIVIDUAL WELFARE COSTS OF STAY-AT-HOME POLICIES (2020)
Working Paper: The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay-at-Home Policies (2020)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hhs:lunewp:2020_009

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