Macroeconomic impacts and transmission channels of an epidemic shock: evidence from the economic performance of China during the 2003 SARS epidemic

Linlin Sun, Yuefei Yang, Jue Wang and Yunyun Jiang

Applied Economics, 2022, vol. 54, issue 25, 2851-2873

Abstract: This paper uses the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic as a quasi-experiment to study the economic impact of epidemic shocks. It aims to answer the following two questions. 1) How does an epidemic affect various macroeconomic variable? 2) What are the transmission channels through which the epidemic shock affected firms? We build an epidemic shock macroeconomic model and use synthetic control method (SCM) and difference-in-differences (DID) estimator to estimate the impact of the 2003 SARS epidemic on the economic performance of China. We find that the SARS epidemic negatively affected China’s GDP growth rates and its levels of consumption, investment, and productivity. The lag time effect of SARS was very short because of the short duration of the outbreak and adequate market liquidity. We isolate and compare the effects of the SARS epidemic from the perspectives of changes in business cycles, labour supply shocks and external financing conditions on firms’ economic performance using firm-specific sensitivity estimates prior to the SARS epidemic. We find that the SARS epidemic had a larger negative impact on firms with higher sensitivity to business cycles and labour supply shocks.

Date: 2022
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DOI: 10.1080/00036846.2021.1999385

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