Evaluating Policies Early in a Pandemic: Bounding Policy Effects with Nonrandomly Missing Data

Brantly Callaway and Tong Li
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Brantly Callaway: University of Georgia
Tong Li: Vanderbilt University

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 2025, vol. 107, issue 3, 803-819

Abstract: During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, national and local governments introduced a number of policies to combat the spread of COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bound the effects of such early-pandemic policies on COVID-19 cases and other outcomes while dealing with complications arising from (i) limited availability of COVID-19 tests, (ii) differential availability of COVID-19 tests across locations, and (iii) eligibility requirements for individuals to be tested. We use our approach study the effects of Tennessee’s expansion of COVID-19 testing early in the pandemic and find that the policy decreased COVID-19 cases.

Date: 2025
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