COVID-19, stigma, and habituation: evidence from mobility data.

BACKGROUND: The Japanese government has restricted people's going-out behavior by declaring a non-punitive state of emergency several times under COVID-19. This study aims to analyze how multiple policy interventions that impose non-legally binding restrictions on behavior associate with people's going-out. THEORY: This study models the stigma model of self-restraint behavior under the pandemic with habituation effects. The theoretical result indicates that the state of emergency's self-restraint effects weaken with the number of times. METHODS: The empirical analysis examines the impact of emergency declarations on going-out behavior using a prefecture-level daily panel dataset. The dataset includes Google's going-out behavior data, the Japanese government's policy interventions based on emergency declarations, and covariates that affect going-out behavior, such as weather and holidays. RESULTS: First, for multiple emergency declarations from the beginning of the pandemic to 2021, the negative association between emergency declarations and mobility was confirmed in a model that did not distinguish the number of emergency declarations. Second, in the model that considers the number of declarations, the negative association was found to decrease with the number of declarations. CONCLUSION: These empirical analyses are consistent with the results of theoretical analyses, which show that the negative association between people's going-out behavior and emergency declarations decreases in magnitude as the number of declarations increases.

COVID-19 with Stigma: Theory and Evidence from Mobility Data.

This study conducts both theoretical and empirical analyses of how non-legally-binding COVID-19 policies affect people's going-out behavior. The theoretical analysis assumes that under a declared state of emergency, the individual going out suffers psychological costs arising from both the risk of infection and the stigma of going out. Our hypothesis states that under a declared state of emergency people refrain from going out because it entails a strong psychological cost. Then, this study estimates a model using regional mobility data and emergency declarations data to analyze self-restraint behavior under a non-legally binding emergency declaration. The results show that, compared with before the declaration of the state of emergency, going-out behavior was suppressed under the state of emergency and after it was lifted even when going out did not result in penalties, which is consistent with the theoretical analysis.