 Conditional persistence? Historical disease exposure and government response to COVID-19Annika Lindskog and Ola Olsson Journal of Comparative Economics, 2026, vol. 54, issue 2, 635-654 Abstract: Drawing on the literature on cultural adaptations to historical disease exposure, we investigate differences in government containment policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesize that a higher historical exposure to disease resulted in a stronger government response to recent COVID deaths, particularly during the first year of the pandemic characterized by fundamental uncertainty. Our empirical analysis confirms this hypothesis, both for differences in government responses to disease dynamics between countries and for differences in state-level containment policies within the United States. Our results suggest that the impact of historical health legacies on contemporary policy may be conditional on the character of the public health risk at hand. Deep cultural norms, determined by historical experiences, may play a minor role most of the time but are activated in times of fundamental uncertainty. Keywords: COVID-19; Cultural persistence; Pathogen prevalence; Containment policy; Behavioral immune system (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:jcecon:v:54:y:2026:i:2:p:635-654 DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2026.01.003 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Comparative Economics is currently edited by D. Berkowitz and G. Roland More articles in Journal of Comparative Economics from Elsevier |
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