The Impact of an Epidemic: Experimental Evidence on Preference Stability from Wuhan

By Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, and Lijia Wei

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine how the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Hubei province of China impacted pro-social behavior and attitudes toward risk and uncertainty. The study repeatedly applies a panel of financially incentivized individual and strategic decision tas...

The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Consumption: Learning from High-Frequency Transaction Data

By Haiqiang Chen, Wenlan Qian, and Qiang Wen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We use daily transaction data in 214 cities to study the impact of COVID-19 on consumption after China's outbreak in late January 2020. Based on difference-in-difference estimation, daily offline consumption—via bank card and mobile Quick Response code ...

Measuring the Impact of COVID-19 on Businesses and People: Lessons from the Census Bureau's Experience

By Catherine Buffington, Jason Fields, and Lucia Foster

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We provide an overview of Census Bureau activities to enhance the consistency, timeliness, and relevance of our data products in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We highlight new data products designed to provide timely and granular information on the p...

Maintaining and Enhancing Labor Statistics during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By William W. Beach

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continued to produce key employment statistics while reengineering operations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person data collection moved to electronic, deadlines were adjusted, and flexibilities were impl...

Measuring Consumer Spending Using Card Transaction Data: Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Abe Dunn, Kyle Hood, Andrea Batch, and Alex Driessen

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Pandemic-driven economic changes are measurable in days and weeks rather than months and years, underscoring a need for more timely economic data to inform the public. We summarize newly available estimates of spending using card transaction data that are...

High-Frequency Data and a Weekly Economic Index during the Pandemic

By Daniel J. Lewis, Karel Mertens, James H. Stock, and Mihir Trivedi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper describes a weekly economic index (WEI) developed to track the rapid economic developments associated with the onset of and policy response to the novel coronavirus in the United States. The WEI, with its ten component series, tracks the overal...

Preparing for a Pandemic: Accelerating Vaccine Availability

By Amrita Ahuja, Susan Athey, Arthur Baker, Eric Budish, Juan Camilo Castillo, Rachel Glennerster, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Kremer, Jean Lee, Canice Prendergast, Christopher M. Snyder, Alex Tabarrok, Brandon Joel Tan, and Witold Więcek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Vaccinating the world's population quickly in a pandemic has enormous health and economic benefits. We analyze the problem faced by governments in determining the scale and structure of procurement for vaccines. We analyze alternative approaches to procur...

Private and Social Returns to R&D: Drug Development and Demographics

By Efraim Benmelech, Janice Eberly, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Joshua Krieger

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Investment in intangible capital such as R&D has increased dramatically since the 1990s. However, productivity growth remains sluggish in recent years. One potential reason is that a significant share of the increase in intangible investment is geared tow...

Are We Consuming Too Much?

By Kenneth Arrow, Partha Dasgupta, Lawrence Goulder, Gretchen Daily, Paul Ehrlich, Geoffrey Heal, Simon Levin, Karl-Göran Mäler, Stephen Schneider, David Starrett, and Brian Walker

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

This paper articulates and applies frameworks for examining whether consumption is excessive. We consider two criteria for the possible excessiveness (or insufficiency) of current consumption. One is an intertemporal utility-maximization criterion: actual...

Private and Public Investments in Biomedical Research

By Maya Durvasula, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, and Heidi Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Recent policy attention has focused on proposals to reduce prices for drugs that have received public funding. From an implementation perspective, such policies rely on public disclosure of government support for research. In this paper, we highlight two ...

The Economics of Crisis Innovation Policy: A Historical Perspective

By Daniel P. Gross and Bhaven N. Sampat

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, policymakers, researchers, and journalists have made comparisons to World War II. In 1940, a group of top US science administrators organized a major coordinated research effort to support the Allied war effor...

Adapting to the COVID-19 Pandemic

By Michael Droste and James H. Stock

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

From early in the COVID-19 pandemic, economists have stressed the importance of individuals endogenously changing their behavior to reduce their risk of infection. This paper quantifies time variation in the endogenous behavioral response of economic acti...

Behavior and the Transmission of COVID-19

By Andrew G. Atkeson, Karen Kopecky, and Tao Zha

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

A simple model of COVID-19 that incorporates feedback from disease prevalence to disease transmission through an endogenous response of human behavior does a remarkable job fitting the main features of the data on the growth rates of daily deaths observed...

Implied Dividend Volatility and Expected Growth

By Niels J. Gormsen, Ralph S. J. Koijen, and Ian W. R. Martin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We study the behavior of implied dividend volatility, constructed from the prices of options on index-level dividends, during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use these data to construct a lower bound on expected excess returns on dividend claims and find that t...

COVID-19 and the Costs of Deadly Disasters

By Sydney C. Ludvigson, Sai Ma, and Serena Ng

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using monthly data on costly natural disasters affecting the United States over the last 40 years, we estimate 2 time series models and use them to generate predictions about the impact of COVID-19. We find that while our models yield reasonable estimates...

"Placebo Tests" for the Impacts of Air Pollution on Health: The Challenge of Limited Health Care Infrastructure

By Bruna Guidetti, Paula Pereda, and Edson Severnini

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

"Placebo tests" are normally used to support evidence of pollution impacts on health outcomes. In this study, we argue that one should be cautious to proceed with falsification tests. We examine how a large metropolitan area in Brazil copes with increased...

Ambiguous Air Pollution Effects of China's COVID-19 Lock-Down

By Douglas Almond, Xinming Du, Valerie J. Karplus, and Shuang Zhang

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Reductions in ambient pollution have been suggested as a "silver lining" to the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyze China's pollution monitor data and account for the large annual improvements in air quality following the Lunar New Year, which essentially coinc...

Environmental Protection or Environmental Protectionism? Evidence from Tail Pipe Emission Standards in China

By Jie Bai, Shanjun Li, Danxia Xie, and Hui Zhou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Under the stated goal of improving air quality, many cities in China restricted the import of used vehicles from other cities based on tail pipe emission standards. Using detailed data on new and used vehicle registration, we examine the impact of the pol...

The Health Impacts of Coal-Fired Power Plants in India and the Co-benefits of Greenhouse Gas Reductions

By Maureen Cropper, Ryna Cui, Sarath Guttikunda, Nate Hultman, Puja Jawahar, Yongjoon Park, Xinlu Yao, and Xiaopeng Song

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Under the Paris Agreement, India has pledged that 40 percent of its electricity generating capacity will come from non-fossil-fuel sources by the year 2030; however, this pledge does not limit total coal-fired generating capacity. As of 2019, planned incr...

Should We Fear Derivatives?

By René M. Stulz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2004

This paper discusses the extent to which derivatives pose threats to firms and to the economy. After reviewing the derivatives markets and putting in perspective the various measures of the size of these markets, the paper shows who uses derivatives and w...