Spatial Interactions and the Spread of COVID-19: A Network Perspective

We use unique data on the travel history of confirmed patients at a daily frequency across 31 provinces in China to study how spatial interactions influence the geographic spread of pandemic COVID-19. We develop and simultaneously estimate a structural model of dynamic disease transmission network formation and spatial interaction. This allows us to understand what externalities the disease risk associated with a single place may create for the entire country. We find a positive and significant spatial interaction effect that strongly influences the duration and severity of pandemic COVID-19. And there exists heterogeneity in this interaction effect: the spatial spillover effect from the source province is significantly higher than from other provinces. Further counterfactual policy analysis shows that targeting the key province can improve the effectiveness of policy interventions for containing the geographic spread of pandemic COVID-19, and the effect of such targeted policy decreases with an increase in the time of delay.

The Unintended Consequences of COVID-19 Economic Responses on First Home Buyers? Evidence from New South Wales, Australia

As in many other nations, the Australian Government implemented monetary and fiscal policies in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to aid economic recovery. Among these policies were specific measures to assist first home buyers (FHBs) in entering the housing market. However, these unprecedented economic policies might have other direct and indirect implications on FHBs, which have yet to be thoroughly explored in the literature. To fill this gap, through a survey, we collected information via public and online mortgage broker platforms from 61 FHBs who successfully entered the housing market or were actively searching during the pandemic. The results found COVID-19 economic responses counterproductive for FHBs, pushing them to a more disadvantaged position due to an overheated property market. In addition, since the onset of the pandemic, property prices have risen significantly, exacerbating housing inequality as FHBs increasingly rely on intergenerational family support, take on more financial risk, and relocate to regional areas due to fear of missing out. The study highlights the need for macroeconomists and housing policymakers to consider these unintended consequences in formulating policies that minimise the adverse effects of economic stimulus measures.

The social value of a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine: Willingness to pay estimates from four western countries.

SARS-CoV-2 vaccines give rise to positive externalities on population health, society and the economy in addition to protecting the health of vaccinated individuals. Hence, the social value of such a vaccine exceeds its market value. This paper estimates the willingness to pay (WTP) for a hypothetical SARS-CoV-2 vaccine (or shadow prices), in four countries, namely the United States (US), the United Kingdom, Spain and Italy during the first wave of the pandemic when COVID-19 vaccines were in development but not yet approved. WTP estimates are elicited using a payment card method to avoid "yea saying" biases, and we study the effect of protest responses, sample selection bias, as well as the influence of trust in government and risk exposure when estimating the WTP. Our estimates suggest evidence of an average value of a hypothetical vaccine of 100-200 US dollars once adjusted for purchasing power parity. Estimates are robust to a number of checks.

Make-in-India: Moving from a Monocentric to a Polycentric Response to the COVID-19 Crisis!

The paper will look at the initial and subsequent Indian government's response to the COVID-19 focusing event. The strategy used to tackle the initial Covid-19 wave in India was copied from resource-rich countries and authoritarian countries and due to centralization bias in India's institutions, a monocentric response to the crisis was the default instead of cooperative solutions. However, the response to the pandemic should have been by multiple decision centers and based on local and institutional knowledge, considering India's institutions, culture, and state capacity, for a "Make-in-India"polycentric response. Solving large-scale health externalities requires coproduction to deal with nested externalities more effectively instead of monocentric global responses. I propose policy considering previous epidemic responses focusing on polycentric governance where civil society is incentivized. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston 2023.

Disputes between neighbors in Mexican cities during the COVID‐19 pandemic

We estimate the effect of the COVID‐19 pandemic lockdown on disputes between neighbors using a panel of 70 cities from across Mexico and a difference‐in‐difference strategy. Our results show that the lockdown exacerbated disputes related to pets as nuisances by 45%, noise by 31%, unruly children by 23%, and garbage by 22%. We do not find any effect of the COVID‐19 lockdown on disputes related to gossip. We also estimate heterogeneous effects of the alcohol sales ban across Mexican municipalities. Our findings suggest that this public policy helped to reduce the likelihood of disputes related to noise and garbage.Alternate :Se estimó el efecto del confinamiento de la pandemia COVID‐19 en las disputas entre vecinos utilizando un panel de 70 ciudades de todo México y una estrategia de diferencias en diferencias. Los resultados muestran que el confinamiento exacerbó las disputas relacionadas con las mascotas como molestias en un 45%, el ruido en un 31%, los niños revoltosos en un 23% y la basura en un 22%. No se encontró ningún efecto del confinamiento de COVID‐19 en las disputas relacionadas con el chismorreo. También se estimaron los efectos heterogéneos de la prohibición de la venta de alcohol en los municipios mexicanos. Los resultados sugieren que esta política pública contribuyó a reducir la probabilidad de conflictos relacionados con el ruido y la basura.Alternate :抄録COVID‐19のパンデミックによるロックダウンが近隣住民間の口論に及ぼす影響を、メキシコ全国の70都市のパネルデータと差分の差分法を用いて推定した。結果から、ロックダウンによって口論が以下のように増加したことが示された。ペットによる迷惑:45%、騒音:31%、素行不良の子供:23%、ゴミ:22%。ゴシップに関する口論には、COVID‐19のロックダウンの影響は見られなかった。また、我々は、メキシコの地方自治体におけるアルコール販売禁止による不均一な影響も推定した。調査結果から、アルコール販売の禁止が騒音とゴミに関する口論の可能性を減らすのに役立ったことが示唆された。

Effects of the vaccination against SARS-CoV-2 on infections and on hospitalizations in European countries.

Since December 2020 vaccines against the SARS-CoV-2 virus have been available. However, little is known regarding their effects on infections and on hospitalizations. To gain insight into this topic we empirically analyze the effects of the vaccinations against SARS-CoV-2 for European countries beginning 2021 to February 2022 with weekly data. We perform panel fixed effects estimations, GMM estimations and nonlinear penalized spline estimations. We find a statistically significant and positive relationship between the share of infections with the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the share of vaccinated people in nine estimations while one estimation output was insignificant. Regarding hospitalizations, six out of ten estimations yielded a statistically insignificant relationship, and three estimation results were weakly statistically significant with a negative coefficient and one indicated a statistically significant negative relation. Hence, there is empirical evidence for a positive relationship between infections and the share of vaccinated people whereas we find weak empirical evidence for a negative relation between vaccinations and hospitalizations. The implication of our analysis is that vaccinations alone cannot end the pandemic. Rather developing effective medicines should be seen as an additional measure. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43546-023-00445-0.

THE SAM APPROACH TO EPIDEMIC MODELS

We discuss the connections between epidemiology models and the search and matching (SAM) approach and draw conclusions about modeling the trade-offs between lockdowns and disease spread. We review the pre-COVID epidemics literature, which was mainly by epidemiologists, and the post-COVID surge in economics papers that use meeting technologies to model the trade-offs. We argue that modeling the decentralized equilibrium with economic trade-offs gives rise to substantially different results from the earlier epidemics literature, but policy action is still welfare-improving because of several externalities. © 2023 by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Synchronisation among short-term rental markets, co-movements and cycles in 39 European cities

This paper presents new evidence of the short-term rental market's prices and transactions from a daily time -series perspective in 39 European cities from 2015 to 2020. It uses Airbnb micro datasets to build time-series cycles by extracting the original observations containing total bookings (rent transactions), rental units sup-ply, and asking rent, with a daily periodicity. The cycles show the periods in which short-rental activity was more relevant for each city, and the level of rents across Europe. The paper provides empirical evidence of a long-term relationship among the city variables (tested via mean and variance). Causality supporting co-movements across cities was found by estimating a short-term naive market equilibrium model using the vector error correction model approach, supporting the hypothesis that the short-term rental market performs according to housing -market principles. Short-run elasticities among rents and contracts across the 39 cities show causal evidence of co-movements among rents and the supply and demand of properties. The market adjustment on the supply side estimates new units responding to changes in prices within 15 lags (days) and longer (350 lags) from the demand side, equivalent to eight to nine months. Evidence of the pandemic's limited effect on housing supply and prices' positive effect is also provided. A robust negative weekend impact on prices was found, suggesting stronger market relevance on weekdays.

The value of sick pay

Not all countries provide universal access to publicly funded paid sick pay. Amongst countries that do, compensation rates can be low and coverage incomplete. This leaves a significant role for employer-provided paid sick pay in many countries. In this paper, we study who has access to employer-provided sick pay and how much it is valued by workers for themselves and others. We find that workers in jobs with high contact to others are particularly unlikely to have employer provided sick pay, as are economically insecure workers who are least able to afford unpaid time off work. We find that workers without sick pay are more likely to say that they will work when experiencing cold-like symptoms and are less willing to expose themselves to health risks at work during the pandemic. Using vignettes, we reveal that large shares of workers have a very high, but even more have a very low willingness to sacrifice earnings for access to sick pay. Together our findings highlight the unequal distribution of access to sick pay and the potentially strong negative externalities of not providing it publicly. The pandemic may have made these issues more salient as perceived probabilities of having to self-isolate are positively related to support for publicly provided sick pay. Finally, we find that providing information on the health externality of paid sick leave increases support for the public provision of sick pay, suggesting that there might be a public under-provision because individuals do not factor in the externalities. © 2022 The Authors

The salience of choice reduces social responsibility: evidence from lab experiments and compliance with COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.

The tension between self-interest and the collective good is fundamental to human societies. We propose that the idea of choice is a key lever that nudges people to act in a self-interested manner because it leads people to value independence. Making one inconsequential choice at the beginning of an incentive-compatible lab experiment made people 41% more likely to choose a monetary allocation that maximized their own payoff while minimizing the total payoff of their group (Studies 1A and 1B). The next two studies featured seven-participant experimental markets in which sellers decided whether to produce conventional goods (which imposed costs on others) or socially responsible goods (which did not impose any costs), and buyers decided which goods to purchase. In markets in which members made a single inconsequential choice, the market share of the socially responsible good was reduced by a factor of 34% (Studies 2A and 2B). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, framing socially responsible actions as choices increased people's willingness to hoard and violate social distancing rules (Study 3). Highlighting the idea of choice reduced people's desire to engage in corporate social responsibility, and this effect was mediated by an increased emphasis on independence (Study 4). Finally, using cell phone location data, an archival study found that in states in which people were more likely to search for choice-related words on the internet in 2019, residents were more likely to leave their homes following a stay-at-home order, after controlling for state-level income, education, diversity, population density, and political orientation (Study 5).

THE SAM APPROACH TO EPIDEMIC MODELS

We discuss the connections between epidemiology models and the search and matching (SAM) approach and draw conclusions about modeling the trade-offs between lockdowns and disease spread. We review the pre-COVID epidemics literature, which was mainly by epidemiologists, and the post-COVID surge in economics papers that use meeting technologies to model the trade-offs. We argue that modeling the decentralized equilibrium with economic trade-offs gives rise to substantially different results from the earlier epidemics literature, but policy action is still welfare-improving because of several externalities. © 2023 by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Optimal epidemic control in equilibrium with imperfect testing and enforcement

We analyze equilibrium behavior and optimal policy within a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered epidemic model augmented with potentially undiagnosed agents who infer their health status and a social planner with imperfect enforcement of social distancing. We define and prove the existence of a perfect Bayesian Markov competitive equilibrium and contrast it with the efficient allocation subject to the same informational constraints. We identify two externalities, static (individual actions affect current risk of infection) and dynamic (individual actions affect future disease prevalence), and study how they are affected by limitations on testing and enforcement. We prove that a planner with imperfect enforcement will always wish to curtail activity, but that its incentives to do so vanish as testing becomes perfect. When a vaccine arrives far into the future, the planner with perfect enforcement may encourage activity before herd immunity. We find that lockdown policies have modest welfare gains, whereas quarantine policies are effective even with imperfect testing. © 2022 The Author(s)

A Multi-Dimensional Nomological Network of Mobile Payment Continuance

Despite the high utilization of mobile payment during the COVID-19 pandemic, this situation may change in the post-pandemic era. Therefore, great value can be derived from determining the significant antecedents of mobile payment continuance intention. This study looks to do so by introducing a Multi-Dimensional Nomological Network of Mobile Payment Continuance. A two-stage Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modeling and Artificial Neural Network was utilized for the data analysis. The results provided empirical support to establish the overall nomological network. In addition, more than 70% of the variance in continuance intention was captured. Overall, this study provides practitioners with detailed insights to develop strategies for sustainable utilization and academics with a dynamic framework to look into users' mobile payment continuance intention.

The value of sick pay

Not all countries provide universal access to publicly funded paid sick pay. Amongst countries that do, compensation rates can be low and coverage incomplete. This leaves a significant role for employer-provided paid sick pay in many countries. In this paper, we study who has access to employer-provided sick pay and how much it is valued by workers for themselves and others. We find that workers in jobs with high contact to others are particularly unlikely to have employer provided sick pay, as are economically insecure workers who are least able to afford unpaid time off work. We find that workers without sick pay are more likely to say that they will work when experiencing cold-like symptoms and are less willing to expose themselves to health risks at work during the pandemic. Using vignettes, we reveal that large shares of workers have a very high, but even more have a very low willingness to sacrifice earnings for access to sick pay. Together our findings highlight the unequal distribution of access to sick pay and the potentially strong negative externalities of not providing it publicly. The pandemic may have made these issues more salient as perceived probabilities of having to self-isolate are positively related to support for publicly provided sick pay. Finally, we find that providing information on the health externality of paid sick leave increases support for the public provision of sick pay, suggesting that there might be a public under-provision because individuals do not factor in the externalities.

Prosocial Antitrust

Antitrust law is at the center of today's public debate. It has even emerged as a rare unifying force, with bipartisan promises to combat the concentration of economic power. Meanwhile, the business community is grappling with mounting systematic risks arising from climate change, income inequality, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Unexpectedly, the largest asset managers in the world find themselves on the front lines of these battles. Due to the rise of index investing, these "universal owners" manage portfolios that are so large and diversified, their holdings mirror the entire economy. Their diversification protects them against idiosyncratic risk, but greatly exposes them to systematic risks. The universal owners are keenly aware of their exposure to these risks. They are turning to their portfolio companies and increasing demands on directors and managers to "serve a social purpose" and reduce their negative externalities. Public-regarding pronouncements from CEOs of Wall Street's biggest firms ring hollow to many shareholder primacy loyalists. But the skeptics downplay the economic logic underlying this paradigm shift-cliversified shareholders do not want companies to externalize their negative impacts onto the rest of the investors' portfolios. Many companies are rising to the challenge and making bold commitments. Some are recognizing that, to overcome pervasive social and environmental challenges, they must collaborate with their competitors. This Article reveals that current antitrust law is a barrier to this collaboration and offers a policy proposal for aligning antitrust law with the demands upon the prosocial corporation. The COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us that we are all interconnected. Climate change will continue to deepen that understanding. The problems we face are difficult, but they are not insurmountable. To solve them, however, antitrust law must empower more collaboration.

The COVID-19 Crisis: A Case of Capitalism’s Dialectic of Failure

Acknowledging the multiple ways capitalism fails humanity and the planet, regularly triggering anticapitalist resistance, this essay employs the term “dialectic of failure” to examine how capitalist failures often boost profits and facilitate capitalism’s reproduction. This tendency for capitalism’s failures to create opportunities as well as risks for itself is analyzed with respect to the COVID-19 pandemic. After first analyzing the pandemic as a capitalist failure, and while acknowledging the social-justice and anticapitalist struggles the pandemic has given rise to, the essay examines how the pandemic may also be facilitating capital accumulation and the reproduction of the prevailing socioeconomic order.

Spreading the disease: Protest in times of pandemics.

This study analyzes the impact of large anti-lockdown protests on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 in Germany. Since protesters at such large gatherings are very mobile and largely neglect SARS-CoV-2 containment strategies, they may contribute to the regional transmission of the coronavirus. Employing novel data on bus connections of travel companies specialized in driving protesters to these gatherings, and exploiting the timing of two large-scale demonstrations in November 2020, we estimate the causal impact of these protests on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 using an event study framework. Our findings imply sizable increases in infection rates in protesters' origin regions after these demonstrations. A month after the protests, treated areas face a relative increase in infection rates up to 35% compared to non-treated areas. Our results shed light on public health consequences of behavior that ignores potential externalities for the society during a pandemic.

Innovative Energy Technologies in Road Transport in Selected EU Countries

The primary aim of this study was to assess and classify selected EU countries to groups differing in terms of the degree of implementation of innovative energy technologies to alleviate adverse externalities in road transport. This aim was realised using three groups of research methods: collection of empirical data, data processing and presentation of study outcomes. When collecting the research material, the authors used the method of critical literature review and the documentation method. The research material was processed using the agglomerative clustering technique, which was one of the hierarchical clustering methods. The distance between objects (here, selected EU countries) was determined based on the Euclidean distance. The outcome of this analysis was a dendrogram, which constitutes a graphical interpretation of obtained results. The study was conducted on 21 EU countries. The analyses covered the years 2013–2019. The sources of materials included literature on the subject and the Eurostat data. The problem of innovative energy technologies in road transport is presently of considerable importance. This results from the current situation related to human activity. As a result of the conducted cluster analysis, groups were distinguished based on differences in the use of innovative energy technologies alleviating negative externalities generated by road transport. The first group comprised Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland. Compared to the other groups, this group was distinguished by the highest values of four indexes, i.e., the share of renewable energy sources used in transport in 2019, the share in the market of electric passenger vehicles in 2019, the share in the market of electric lorries in 2019, as well as the share in the market of hybrid automobiles in 2019. Countries which participated the least in the elimination of negative externalities generated by road transport included Romania, Hungary, Greece, Poland, Latvia and Estonia.

Externalities of dockless bicycle-sharing systems: Implications for green recovery of the transportation sector

As an innovative and convenient micro-mobility service, dockless bicycle-sharing systems (DBSSs) are essential to achieving green recovery of the transportation sector in post-COVID-19 world. DBSS green externalities on climate change have attracted the attention of scholars and have revealed different roles in carbon mitigation in different studies. In this study, Shanghai is employed as a case city to analyze DBSS green externalities. The direct carbon emissions reduced by DBSS cycling are calculated and the indirect carbon mitigation by a DBSS in promoting use of low-carbon public transport is estimated. The carbon consumption of DBSS from the perspective of life-cycle assessment is also valued. The results show that DBSSs have much greater carbon mitigation potential in promoting the use of low-carbon public transport than do cycling routes. The production, maintenance, and rebalance of DBSSs may produce a large number of carbon emissions and even offset their green benefits. The application of (electric) e-bikes and the integration of DBSSs and public transportation should be the key issue for policy makers to promote the green recovery of the transport sector. This study calls for further studies to demonstrate the green externality of DBSSs based on the detailed operation dataset.

Spatial Interactions and the Spread of COVID-19: A Network Perspective

We use unique data on the travel history of confirmed patients at a daily frequency across 31 provinces in China to study how spatial interactions influence the geographic spread of pandemic COVID-19. We develop and simultaneously estimate a structural model of dynamic disease transmission network formation and spatial interaction. This allows us to understand what externalities the disease risk associated with a single place may create for the entire country. We find a positive and significant spatial interaction effect that strongly influences the duration and severity of pandemic COVID-19. And there exists heterogeneity in this interaction effect: the spatial spillover effect from the source province is significantly higher than from other provinces. Further counterfactual policy analysis shows that targeting the key province can improve the effectiveness of policy interventions for containing the geographic spread of pandemic COVID-19, and the effect of such targeted policy decreases with an increase in the time of delay.