Trading Off Consumption and COVID-19 Deaths

By Robert E. Hall, Charles I. Jones, Peter J. Klenow. Quarterly Review, 2020

209 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This note develops a framework for thinking about the following question: What is the maximum amount of consumption that a utilitarian welfare function would be willing to trade off to avoid the deaths associated with COVID-19? The answer depends crucially on the mortality rate associated with the coronavirus. If the mortality rate averages 0.81%, as projected in one prominent study, our answer is 41% of one year's consumption. If the mortality rate instead averages 0.44% across age groups, as suggested by a recent seroprevalence study, our answer is 28%.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ad66b4ac1789da59120ad5f811ba9fa81f956d6f

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In Economics and Econometrics

1. Julien Sauvagnat
2. Jean-Noël Barrot
3. Matthew O. Jackson
4. Philipp Krueger
5. Agathe Pernoud
6. Rajna Gibson

Citations in the corpus

• Nonlinear Production Networks with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, unknown): “Atalay (2017), Herrendorf et al. (2013), and Oberfield and Raval (2014), all of use an elasticity of substitution in consumption σ slightly less than one.”
• Lives and livelihoods: Estimates of the global mortality and poverty effects of the Covid-19 pandemic (2020, unknown): “If median poverty lines are used for LICs, LMICs, UMICs and HICs, we estimate that 235 million poverty-years are being generated this year. Across countries, the poverty-years to lost-years ratio ranges from just above 1 to more than 10,000. It is 3.6 in Belgium and 195 in Pakistan, for example. We ”
• Sectoral Effects of Social Distancing (2020, background): “Hall et al. (2020) provides insights on the tradeoff between consumption and COVID-19 deaths.”
• Supply and Demand in Disaggregated Keynesian Economies with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, unknown): “…(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), Fernández-Villaverde and Jones (2020), Hall et al. (2020), Glover et al. (2020), Bonadio et al. (2020), and Acemoglu et al. (2020).”