Longer-Run Economic Consequences of Pandemics

By Ò. Jordà, Sanjay R. Singh, Alan M. Taylor. Review of Economics and Statistics, 2020

585 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract What are the medium- to long-term effects of pandemics? Do they differ from other economic disasters? We study major pandemics using rates of return on assets stretching back to the fourteenth century. Significant macroeconomic after-effects of pandemics persist for decades, with rates of return substantially depressed. The responses are in stark contrast to what happens after wars. Our findings also accord with wage and output responses, using more limited data, and are consistent with the neoclassical growth model: capital is destroyed in wars but not in pandemics; pandemics instead may induce more labor scarcity or more precautionary savings, or both.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac9331c503e0cecb8085541187a3e639a15dac80

Citations in the corpus

• Consumer Spending Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Assessment of Great Britain (2020, unknown): “Hassan et al (2020) develop text-based measures of the costs, benefits, and risks to listed firms in over 80 countries affected by COVID- 9 Jorda et al (2020) provide a useful discussion of the long-run economic consequences of pandemics from the Black Death of 1347 to the present day.”
• A literature review of the economics of COVID‐19 (2020, unknown): “Jordà et al. (2020) analyze the rate of return on the real natural interest rate (the level of real returns on safe assets resulting from the demand and supply of investment capital in a noninflationary environment) from the 14th century to 2018.”
• Supply and Demand in Disaggregated Keynesian Economies with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, unknown): “…(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. (2020),…”
• The Impact of Covid-19 on Productivity (2020, unknown): “6 market impacts of Covid-19, Adams-Prassl et al. (2020), Alon et al. (2020) and Mongey et al. (2020) and show the gender impact of the pandemic, Guerrieri et al. (2020) show that supply shocks can cause demand shortages, and Jorda et al. (2020) examine the longer-run consequences of past pandemics.”
• Nonlinear Production Networks with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, unknown): “…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. (2020), Barro et al. (2020), Fernández-Villaverde and 3See e.g. Jones (2011) and Baqaee…”
• Macroeconomic Implications of COVID-19: Can Negative Supply Shocks Cause Demand Shortages? (2020, unknown): “Jorda et al. (2020) provide some time-series evidence from historical pandemics on the impact on rates of return.”