The Causal Effects of Lockdown Policies on Health and Macroeconomic Outcomes

Jonas E. Arias, Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, Juan F Rubio-Ramirez and Minchul Shin

No 28617, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We assess the causal impact of epidemic-induced lockdowns on health and macroeconomic outcomes and measure the trade-off between containing the spread of an epidemic and economic activity. To do so, we estimate an epidemiological model with time-varying parameters and use its output as information for estimating SVARs and LPs that quantify the causal effects of nonpharmaceutical policy interventions. We apply our approach to Belgian data for the COVID-19 epidemic during 2020. We find that additional government-mandated mobility curtailments would have reduced deaths at a very small cost in terms of GDP.

JEL-codes: C1 C5 I1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cwa and nep-ore
Note: EFG
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published as Jonas E. Arias & Jesús Fernández-Villaverde & Juan F. Rubio-Ramírez & Minchul Shin, 2023. "The Causal Effects of Lockdown Policies on Health and Macroeconomic Outcomes," American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, vol 15(3), pages 287-319.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28617.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nbr:nberwo:28617

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w28617

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().