Did State Reopenings Increase Social Interactions?

Rajashri Chakrabarti and Maxim Pinkovskiy

No 20200617, Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York

Abstract: Social distancing—avoiding nonessential movement and largely staying at home—is seen as key to limiting the spread of COVID-19. To promote social distancing, over forty states imposed shelter-in-place or stay-at-home orders, closing nonessential businesses, banning large gatherings, and encouraging citizens to stay home. Over the course of the last month, virtually all of these states have reopened. However, these reopenings were preceded by a spontaneous increase in mobility and decline in social distancing. Did the reopenings decrease social distancing, or did it ratify ex post what was already going to take place? In this post, we will investigate this question using an event study methodology and demonstrate that reopenings probably have caused a large decline in social distancing, even after accounting for the trends already in place at the time of reopening.

Keywords: pandemic; COVID-19; state reopenings; social distancing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-06-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2020 ... al-interactions.html Full text (text/html)

Related works:
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:fip:fednls:88185

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Liberty Street Economics from Federal Reserve Bank of New York Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Gabriella Bucciarelli ().