Optimal Mitigation Policies in a Pandemic: Social Distancing and Working from Home

By Callum Jones, Thomas Philippon, Venky Venkateswaran. The Review of financial studies, 2020

407 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study an economy’s response to an unexpected epidemic. The spread of the disease can be mitigated by reducing consumption and hours worked in the office. Working from home is subject to learning-by-doing. Private agents’ rational incentives are relatively weak and fatalistic. The planner recognizes infection and congestion externalities and implements front-loaded mitigation. Under our calibration, the planner reduces cumulative fatalities by 48$\%$ compared to 24$\%$ by private agents, although with a sharper drop in consumption. Our model can replicate key industry and/or occupational-level patterns and explain how large variations in outcomes across regions can stem from small initial differences.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Modeling and Simulation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/17f422556320b903e9c91b88323d6c37f74a42bc

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Nonlinear Production Networks with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, neutral): “…Bethune and Korinek (2020), Guerrieri et al. (2020), Bigio et al. (2020), Caballero and Simsek (2020), Faria-e Castro (2020), Gourinchas (2020), Jones et al. (2020), Jorda et al. (2020), Kaplan et al. (2020), Krueger et al. (2020), Jorda et al. (2020), Bodenstein et al. (2020), Barrot et al.…”
The US Labor Market during the Beginning of the Pandemic Recession (2020, background): “Papers in this vein include Alvarez et al. (2020), Eichenbaum et al. (2020), Jones et al. (2020), Kaplan et al. (2020) and Berger et al. (2020).”
A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, neutral): “Jones et al. (2020) argue that in contrast to private agents, the social planner will seek to front-loadmitigation strategies: that is to impose strict lockdowns from the beginning to reduce the spread of infection and let the economy to fall into a deep recession.”
The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, neutral): “…quantify the economic costs and benefits of different policies (see Atkeson (2020), Barro et al. (2020), Eichenbaum et al. (2020), Farboodi et al. (2020), Jones et al. (2020), Kaplan et al. (2020), Krueger et al. (2020), Guerrieri et al. (2020), Alvarez et al. (2020), and Dietrich et al. (2020)).”
Decline in Mobility: Public Transport in Poland in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “Jones et al. (2020) emphasize that governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic show a search for a balance between health and economic goals.”
Exploring the impacts of COVID-19 on travel behavior and mode preferences (2020, neutral): “…that working from home (i.e., limiting home-based work trips) and reducing consumption (i.e., limiting home-based shopping trips), limiting community contacts, and restricting international travel are effective mitigation policies (Jones et al., 2020; Milne et al., 2008; Yilmazkuday, 2020).”
Supply and Demand in Disaggregated Keynesian Economies with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, neutral): “…(2020), Alvarez et al. (2020), Atkeson (2020a,b), Bethune and Korinek (2020), Caballero and Simsek (2020), Faria-e Castro (2020), Gourinchas (2020), Jones et al. (2020), Jorda et al. (2020), Kaplan et al. (2020), Krueger et al. (2020), Jorda et al. (2020), Bodenstein et al. (2020), Barro et al.…”