Life Expectancy During the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Semi-Parametric Difference-in-Differences Analysis
Michael Polemis () and
Thanasis Stengos
MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany
Abstract:
The scope of this note is to investigate the causal effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on life expectancy over a sample of 47 countries split into two groups. The first one includes countries that have adopted general lockdown measures (treatment group), while the second one consists of countries that have imposed social distancing measures other than a national lockdown (control group). The investigated period starts from the first confirmed European case back (25.01.2020) until 28.07.2020 and covers the first wave of the pandemic for the sample countries. The empirical results based on a Semi-Parametric Difference-in-Differences framework, suggest a decline in life expectancy at birth estimated to 1.38 years on average even though the countries who did implement the lockdown measures were motivated and willing to do so. However, the decrease in life expectancy would have been double (2.9 years) in the absence of such willingness to adopt the policy. Lastly, the findings support the argument that national lockdown would be an effective policy tool to the hands of regulators and health practitioners to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic infection it is pursued by motivated and willing participant countries.
Keywords: Covid-19; Life expectancy; Lockdown; Social distancing; Semi-parametric Difference-in-Differences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-09-22
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/103051/1/MPRA_paper_103051.pdf original version (application/pdf)
Related works:
Journal Article: Life expectancy during the Covid-19 pandemic: A semi-parametric difference-in-differences analysis (2022) 
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:pra:mprapa:103051
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().