Education and COVID-19 excess mortality

Piera Bello and Lorenzo Rocco

Economics & Human Biology, 2022, vol. 47, issue C

Abstract: We study the role of education during the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy. We compare excess mortality in 2020 and 2021 compared to the pre-pandemic mortality between municipalities with different shares of educated residents. We find that education initially played a strong protective role, which however quickly faded out. After pondering several alternative explanations, we tentatively interpret this finding as the outcome of the interplay between education, information and public health communication, whose availability and coherence varied along the epidemic.

Keywords: COVID-19; Education; Excess mortality; Municipality; Parallel trend; Fake news; Public health communication (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I14 I18 I26 R00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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Working Paper: Education and COVID-19 excess mortality (2021)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ehbiol:v:47:y:2022:i:c:s1570677x22000909

DOI: 10.1016/j.ehb.2022.101194

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