Infectious disease and endogenous cycles: lockdown hits two birds with one stone

David Desmarchelier, Magali Jaoul-Grammare, Guillaume Morel and Thi Kim Cuong Pham ()

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: This paper develops a competitive Ramsey-Cass-Koopmans framework in which an infectious disease evolves according to a simple SIS model. It aims at examining how the lockdown a§ects infectious disease persistence, individual welfare, and economic dynamics. In contrast to the existing literature, two types of infectives are introduced: (1) symptomatics and (2) asymptomatics. While the former is assumed to be too ill to work, the latter supply their labour and spread the disease. The government imposes a lockdown as an instrument to control the disease spread. In the long run, when the contamination rate of the disease is relatively high and the share of asymptomatics is low enough, the lockdown is welfare improving regardless of the degree of household empathy toward infectives. Moreover, a stable limit cycle can emerge near the endemic steady-state, through a Hopf bifurcation, when the share of infectives increases sufficiently the marginal utility of consumption. Particularly, we prove that it is possible to tune the lockdown to simultaneously obtain the limit cycle disappearance and the disease eradication (Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation). In this sense, the lockdown allows hitting two birds with one stone.

Keywords: Bogdanov-Takens bifurcation; Hopf bifurcation; Lockdown; Ramsey model; SIS model. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C61 E13 I18 O41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea, nep-mac and nep-upt
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Working Paper: Infectious disease and endogenous cycles: lockdown hits two birds with one stone (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2021-23

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