EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The "Great Lockdown": Inactive Workers and Mortality by Covid-19

Nicola Borri, Francesco Drago, Chiara Santantonio and Francesco Sobbrio

No 8584, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: In response to the Covid-19 outbreak the Italian Government imposed an economic lockdown on March 22, 2020 and ordered the closing of all non-essential economic activities. This paper estimates the causal effects of this measure on mortality by Covid-19 and on mobility patterns. The identification of the causal effects exploits the variation in the active population across municipalities induced by the economic lockdown. The difference-in-differences empirical design compares outcomes in municipalities above and below the median variation in the share of active population before and after the lockdown within a province, also controlling for municipality-specific dynamics, daily-shocks at the provincial level and municipal unobserved characteristics. Our results show that the intensity of the economic lockdown is associated with a statistically significant reduction in mortality by Covid-19 and, in particular, for age groups between 40-64 and older (with larger and more significant effects for individuals above 50). Back of the envelope calculations indicate that 4,793 deaths were avoided, in the 26 days between April 5 to April 30, in the 3,518 municipalities which experienced a more intense lockdown. Several robustness checks corroborate our empirical findings.

Keywords: Covid-19; economic lockdown; excess deaths; mobility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H51 I10 I18 I30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age and nep-eur
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp8584.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The “Great Lockdown”: Inactive workers and mortality by Covid‐19 (2021) Downloads
Working Paper: The 'Great Lockdown': Inactive Workers and Mortality by Covid-19 (2020) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8584

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-30
Handle: RePEc:ces:ceswps:_8584