The Psychological Consequences of COVID-19 Lockdowns

Kien Le and My Nguyen

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: COVID-19 outbreak has resulted in the largest number of lockdowns worldwide in history. While lockdowns may reduce the spread of COVID-19, the downside costs of this approach could be dreadful. By exploiting the differential timing of lockdown implementation across the United States within a difference-in-differences framework, we find that the pandemic lockdowns are associated with a variety of adverse psychological outcomes, namely, anxiety, worry, disinterest, depression, and poor general health perception. Our mechanism analyses suggest that these detrimental impacts could be attributed to concerns towards food, housing, and employment security. We further show that African Americans and women are especially susceptible to the adverse repercussions of the lockdowns. The findings imply that lockdowns should be accompanied by policies aimed to prevent mental health burden and deepening inequality.

Keywords: COVID-19; psychological consequences; mental health; lockdowns; stay-at-home orders (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/104861/1/MPRA_paper_104861.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:104861

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 ().