Three Free DP Downloads 14 April 2020
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Health versus wealth: On the Distributional Effects of Controlling a Pandemic
Andrew Glover, Jonathan Heathcote, Dirk Krueger, Jose-Victor Rios-Rull
CEPR DP No. 14606 | 12 April 2020
Abstract: Many countries are shutting non-essential sectors of the economy to slow the spread of COVID-19. The gains and losses from these policies are very unequally distributed. Older individuals have most to gain from slowing virus diffusion. Younger workers in sectors that are shuttered have the most to lose. In this paper we first extend a standard epidemiological model of disease progression to include heterogeneity by age, and multiple sources of disease transmission. We then incorporate the epidemiological block into a multi-sector economic model in which workers differ by sector (basic and luxury) as well as by health status. Individuals value consumption, life, and health. We study optimal mitigation policies of a utilitarian government that can redistribute resources across individuals, but where such redistribution is costly. We show that optimal redistribution- and mitigation policies interact and thus the utilitarian government chooses a very different mitigation policy path than would be suggested by a representative agent setting. This policy reflects a compromise between the strongly diverging preferred policy paths across the subgroups of the population.
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How Many Jobs Can be Done at Home?
Jonathan Dingel, Brent Neiman
CEPR DP No. 14584 | 08 April 2020
Abstract: Evaluating the economic impact of "social distancing" measures taken to arrest the spread of COVID-19 raises a fundamental question about the modern economy: How many jobs can be performed at home? We classify the feasibility of working at home for all occupations and merge this classification with occupational employment counts for the United States. Our classification implies that 37 percent of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home.
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Firm-Level Exposure to Epidemic Diseases: Covid-19, SARS, and H1N1
Tarek Hassan, Stephan Hollander, Laurence van Lent, Ahmed Tahoun
CEPR DP No. 14573 | 06 April 2020
Abstract: Using tools described in our earlier work Hassan et al. (2019,2020), we develop text-based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks listed firms in the US and over 80 other countries associate with the spread of Covid-19 and other epidemic diseases. We identify which firms expect to gain or lose from an epidemic disease and which are most affected by the associated uncertainty as a disease spreads in a region or around the world. As Covid-19 spreads globally in the first quarter of 2020, we find that firms' primary concerns relate to the collapse of demand, increased uncertainty, and disruption in supply chains. Other important concerns relate to capacity reductions, closures, and employee welfare. By contrast, financing concerns are mentioned relatively rarely. We also identify some firms that foresee opportunities in new or disrupted markets due to the spread of the disease. Finally, we find some evidence that firms that have experience with SARS or H1N1 have more positive expectations about their ability to deal with the coronavirus outbreak.
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More CEPR discussion papers focusing on COVID-19 economic analysis can be found below:
DP14607 Macroeconomic Dynamics and Reallocation in an Epidemic
Author(s): Dirk Krueger, Harald Uhlig, Taojun Xie
DP14600 The Coronavirus Stimulus Package: How large is the transfer multiplier?
Author(s): Christian Bayer, Benjamin Born, Ralph Luetticke, Gernot Müller
DP14596 COVID-19 Infection Externalities: Trading Off Lives vs. Livelihoods
Author(s): Anton Korinek, Zachary Bethune
DP14571 The Covid-19 Pandemic and Corporate Dividend Policy
Author(s): Josef Zechner, Georg Cejnek, Otto Randl
DP14569 Systemic Banking Crises Database: A Timely Update in COVID-19 Times
Author(s): Luc Laeven, Fabian Valencia
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