Sweden has adopted far less restrictive social distancing policies than most countries following the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses data on all mobile phone users, from one major Swedish mobile phone network, to examine the impact of the Coronavirus outbreak under the Swedish mild recommendations and restrictions regime on individual mobility and if changes in geographical mobility vary over different socio-economic strata. Having access to data for January-March in both 2019 and 2020 enables the estimation of causal effects of the COVID-19 outbreak by adopting a Difference-in-Differences research design. The paper reaches four main conclusions: (i) The daytime population in residential areas increased significantly (64 percent average increase); (ii) The daytime presence in industrial and commercial areas decreased significantly (33 percent average decrease); (iii) The distance individuals move from their homes during a day was substantially reduced (38 percent decrease in the maximum distance moved and 36 percent increase in share of individuals who move less than one kilometer from home); (iv) Similar reductions in mobility were found for residents in areas with different socioeconomic and demographic characteristics. These results show that mild government policies can compel people to adopt social distancing behavior.
A nudge changes people's actions without removing their options or altering their incentives. During the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, the Swedish Region of Uppsala sent letters with pre-booked appointments to inhabitants aged 16-17 instead of opening up manual appointment booking. Using regional and municipal vaccination data, we document a higher vaccine uptake among 16- to 17-year-olds in Uppsala compared to untreated control regions (constructed using the synthetic control method as well as neighboring municipalities). The results highlight pre-booked appointments as a strategy for increasing …
This paper uses transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25 percent in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points in Denmark. This implies that most…
The COVID19 pandemic has forced Indian engineering institutions (EIs) to bring their previous half shut shades completely down. Fetching new admissions to EI campuses during the pandemic has become a now or never situation for EIs. During crisis situations, institutions have struggled to return to the normal track. The pandemic has drastically changed students behavior and family preferences due to mental stress and the emotional life attached to it. Consequently, it becomes a prerequisite, and emergencies need to examine the choice characteristics influencing the selection of EI during the CO…
The authors of the article analyze the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on the transport and logistics sector. The research is interdisciplinary in nature. The purpose of the study is to identify and briefly characterize new trends in the field of transport and cargo transportation in post-COVID conditions.
We investigate the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the transition between high school and college in Brazil. Using microdata from the universe of students that applied to a selective university, we document how the Covid-19 shock increased enrollment for students in the top 10% high-quality public and private high schools. This increase comes at the expense of graduates from relatively lower-quality schools. Furthermore, this effect is entirely driven by applicants who were at high school during the Covid pandemic. The effect is large and completely offsets the gains in student background d…
The COVID-19 pandemic forced almost all professional and amateur sports to be played without attending crowds. Thus, it induced a large-scale natural experiment on the impact of social pressure on decision making and behavior in sports fields. Using a data set of 1027 rugby union matches from 11 tournaments in 10 countries, we find that home teams have won less matches and their points difference decreased during the pandemics, shedding light on the impact of crowd attendance on the {\em home advantage} of sports teams.
Behavioral responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioral responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate that risk-taking attitude is a critical factor in predicting reduction in human mobility and increase social confinement around the globe. We find that the sharp decline in movement after the WHO (World Health Organization) declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic can be attributed to risk attitudes. Our results suggest that regions with risk-averse att…
During the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic, national and local governments introduced a number of policies to combat the spread of Covid-19. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bound the effects of such early-pandemic policies on Covid-19 cases and other outcomes while dealing with complications arising from (i) limited availability of Covid-19 tests, (ii) differential availability of Covid-19 tests across locations, and (iii) eligibility requirements for individuals to be tested. We use our approach study the effects of Tennessee's expansion of Covid-19 testing early in the pandem…
This paper documents changes in retirement saving patterns at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We construct a large panel of U.S. tax data, including tens of millions of person-year observations, and measure retirement savings contributions and withdrawals. We use these data to document several important changes in retirement savings patterns during the pandemic relative to the years preceding the pandemic or the Great Recession. First, unlike during the Great Recession, contributions to retirement savings vehicles did not meaningfully decline. Second, driven by the suspension of required m…
The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge to humanity and science. On the one side, public and private incentives have been put in place to promptly allocate resources toward research areas strictly related to the COVID-19 emergency. But on the flip side, research in many fields not directly related to the pandemic has lagged behind. In this paper, we assess the impact of COVID-19 on world scientific production in the life sciences. We investigate how the usage of medical subject headings (MeSH) has changed following the outbreak. We estimate through a difference-in-difference…
Background: A major question in Covid-19 research is whether democracies handled the Covid-19 pandemic crisis better or worse than authoritarian countries. However, it is important to consider the issues of democracy versus authoritarianism, and state fragility, when examining official Covid-19 death counts in research, because these factors can influence the accurate reporting of pandemic deaths by governments. In contrast, excess deaths are less prone to variability in differences in definitions of Covid-19 deaths and testing capacities across countries. Here we use excess pandemic deaths to…
COVID-19 pandemic has shaken the roots of healthcare facilities worldwide, with the US being one of the most affected countries irrespective of being a superpower. Along with the current pandemic, COVID-19 can cause a secondary crisis of mental health pandemic if left unignored. Various studies from past epidemics, financial turmoil and pandemic, especially SARS and MERS, have shown a steep increase in mental and psychological issues like depression, low quality of life, self-harm and suicidal tendencies among general populations. The most venerable being the individuals infected and cured due…
This study focuses on an important transport-related long-term effect of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: an increase in telecommuting. Analyzing a nationally representative panel survey of adults, we find that 40-50% of workers expect to telecommute at least a few times per month post-pandemic, up from 24% pre-COVID. If given the option, 90-95% of those who first telecommuted during the pandemic plan to continue the practice regularly. We also find that new telecommuters are demographically similar to pre-COVID telecommuters. Both pre- and post-COVID, higher educational attainment …
In this study, empirical moments and the cointegration for all the liquid commodity futures traded in the Chinese futures markets are analyzed for the periods before and after Covid-19, which is important for trading strategies such as pairs trading. The results show that the positive change in the average returns of the products such as soybean, corn, corn starch, and iron ore futures are significantly stronger than other products in the post Covid-19 era, whereas the volatility increased most for silver, petroleum asphalt and egg futures after the pandemic started. The number of cointegrated…
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly influenced all modes of transportation. However, it is still unclear how the pandemic affected the demand for ridesourcing services and whether these effects varied between small towns and large cities. We analyzed over 220 million ride requests in the City of Chicago (population: 2.7 million), Illinois, and 52 thousand in the Town of Innisfil (population: 37 thousand), Ontario, to investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the ridesourcing demand in the two locations. Overall, the pandemic resulted in fewer trips in areas with higher proportions…
We lightly modify Eriksson's (1996) model to accommodate the home office in a simple model of endogenous growth. By home office we mean any working activity carried out away from the workplace which is assumed to be fixed. Due to the strong mobility restrictions imposed on citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic, we allow the home office to be located at home. At the home office, however, in consequence of the fear and anxiety workers feel because of COVID-19, they become distracted and spend less time working. We show that in the long run, the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of the hom…
It is important and informative to compare and contrast major economic crises in order to confront novel and unknown cases such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The 2006 Great Recession and then the 2019 pandemic have a lot to share in terms of unemployment rate, consumption expenditures, and interest rates set by Federal Reserve. In addition to quantitative historical data, it is also interesting to compare the contents of Federal Reserve statements for the period of these two crises and find out whether Federal Reserve cares about similar concerns or there are some other issues that demand separate…
This paper studies whether and how differently projected information about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic affects individuals' prosocial behavior and expectations on future outcomes. We conducted an online experiment with British participants (N=961) when the UK introduced its first lockdown and the outbreak was on its growing stage. Participants were primed with either the environmental or economic consequences (i.e., negative primes), or the environmental or economic benefits (i.e., positive primes) of the pandemic, or with neutral information. We measured priming effects on an incentiv…
The massive shock of the COVID-19 pandemic is already showing its negative effects on economies around the world, unprecedented in recent history. COVID-19 infections and containment measures have caused a general slowdown in research and new knowledge production. Because of the link between R&D spending and economic growth, it is to be expected then that a slowdown in research activities will slow in turn the global recovery from the pandemic. Many recent studies also claim an uneven impact on scientific production across gender. In this paper, we investigate the phenomenon across countries, …
This paper examines the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) using the historical approach by analyzing the policy responses of the region to past crises and their economic consequences. The study employs the manufacturing-value-added share of GDP as a performance indicator. The analysis shows that wrong policy intervention to past crises, lead the African sub-region into the deplorable economic situation. The study observed that the region leapfrogged prematurely to import substitution, export promotion, and global value chains. Based on these past experi…
This paper documents that the COVID-19 pandemic induced pressures on the health care system have significant adverse knock-on effects on the accessibility and quality of non-COVID-19 care. We observe persistently worsened performance and longer waiting times in A&E; drastically limited access to specialist care; notably delayed or inaccessible diagnostic services; acutely undermined access to and quality of cancer care. We find that providers under COVID-19 pressures experience notably more excess deaths among non-COVID related hospital episodes such as, for example, for treatment of heart att…
This study investigates the influence of infection cases of COVID-19 and two non-compulsory lockdowns on human mobility within the Tokyo metropolitan area. Using the data of hourly staying population in each 500m$\times$500m cell and their city-level residency, we show that long-distance trips or trips to crowded places decrease significantly when infection cases increase. The same result holds for the two lockdowns, although the second lockdown was less effective. Hence, Japanese non-compulsory lockdowns influence mobility in a similar way to the increase in infection cases. This means that t…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused enormous disruptions to not only the United States, but also the global economy. Due to the pandemic, issues in the supply chain and concerns about food shortage drove up the food prices. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the prices for food increased 4.1% and 3.7% over the year ended in August 2020 and August 2021, respectively, while the amount of annual increase in the food prices prior to the COVID-19 pandemic is less than 2.0%. Previous studies show that such kinds of exogenous disasters, including the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake, 9…
The COVID-19 pandemic has been influencing travel behaviour in many urban areas around the world since the beginning of 2020. As a consequence, bike-sharing schemes have been affected partly due to the change in travel demand and behaviour as well as a shift from public transit. This study estimates the varying effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the London bike-sharing system (Santander Cycles) over the period March-December 2020. We employed a Bayesian second-order random walk time-series model to account for temporal correlation in the data. We compared the observed number of cycle hires and…
The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically impacted people's travel behaviour and out-of-home activity participation. While countermeasures are being eased with increasing vaccination rates, the demand for public transport remains uncertain. To investigate user preferences to travel by London Underground during the pandemic, we conducted a stated choice experiment among its pre-pandemic users (N=961). We analysed the collected data using multinomial and mixed logit models. Our analysis provides insights into the sensitivity of the demand for the London Underground with respect to travel attributes …
Equilibrium models for energy markets under uncertain demand and supply have attracted considerable attentions. This paper focuses on modelling crude oil market share under the COVID-19 pandemic using two-stage stochastic equilibrium. We describe the uncertainties in the demand and supply by random variables and provide two types of production decisions (here-and-now and wait-and-see). The here-and-now decision in the first stage does not depend on the outcome of random events to be revealed in the future and the wait-and-see decision in the second stage is allowed to depend on the random even…
'Publish or perish' is an expression describing the pressure on academics to consistently publish research to ensure a successful career in academia. With a global pandemic that has changed the world, how has it changed academic productivity? Here we show that academics are posting just as many publications on the arXiv pre-print server as if there were no pandemic: 168,630 were posted in 2020, a +12.6% change from 2019 and $+1.4σ$ deviation above the predicted 162,577 $\pm$ 4,393. However, some immediate impacts are visible in individual research fields. Conference cancellations have led to s…
