THE INDIVIDUAL WELFARE COSTS OF STAY-AT-HOME POLICIES

Ola Andersson, Pol Campos-Mercade, Fredrik Carlsson, Florian Schneider and Erik Wengström

No 787, Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and representative sample of the Swedish population. The results suggest that the welfare cost of a one-month stay-at-home policy, restricting non-working hours away from home, amounts to 9.1 percent of qSweden's monthly GDP. The cost can be interpreted as 29,600 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), which roughly corresponds to between 3,700 and 8,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Moreover, we find that stricter and longer lockdowns are disproportionately more costly than more lenient ones. This result indicates that strict stay-at-home policies are likely to be cost-effective only if they slow the spread of the disease much more than more lenient ones.

Keywords: Stay-at-home orders; welfare effects; choice experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D62 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-06
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/64576 Full text (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay-at-Home Policies (2020)
Working Paper: The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay-At-Home Policies (2020)
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:hhs:gunwpe:0787

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg, Box 640, SE 405 30 GÖTEBORG, Sweden. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jessica Oscarsson ().