Evaluating the Effectiveness of Policies Against a Pandemic

Christian Alemán, Christopher Busch, Alexander Ludwig and Raül Santaeulà lia-Llopis
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Christian Alemán: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Raül Santaeulà lia-Llopis: Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Raul Santaeulalia-Llopis () and Christian Daniel Alemán Pericón

No 2020-078, Working Papers from Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group

Abstract: We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than over time. We use a normalization procedure, built around making the pre-policy paths of the epidemic identical across regions, to uncover regional variation in the stage of the epidemic at the time of policy implementation. This variation delivers clean identification of the policy effect based on the epidemic path of a leading region that serves as a counterfactual for other regions. We apply our method to evaluate the effectiveness of the nationwide stay-home policy enacted in Spain against the COVID-19 pandemic. We nd that the policy saved 15:9% of lives. Its effectiveness evolves with the epidemic and is larger when implemented at earlier stages.

Keywords: macroeconomics; pandemic; stages; COVID-19; stay-home; policy effects; identification (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E01 E22 E25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eur and nep-mac
Note: M
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Aleman ... olicies-pandemic.pdf First version, October 16, 2020 (application/pdf)
http://humcap.uchicago.edu/RePEc/hka/wpaper/Aleman ... cies-pandemic_r1.pdf Second version, October 21, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Policies Against a Pandemic (2020)
Working Paper: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Policies Against a Pandemic (2020)
Working Paper: Evaluating the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic (2020)
Working Paper: Evaluating the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic (2020)
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