The Coronavirus and the Great Influenza Epidemic - Lessons from the 'Spanish Flu' for the Coronavirus's Potential Effects on Mortality and Economic Activity

By Robert J. Barro, J. Ursúa, Joanna Weng. Social Science Research Network, 2020

730 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mortality and economic contraction during the 1918-1920 Great Influenza Epidemic provide plausible upper bounds for outcomes under the coronavirus (COVID-19). Data for 43 countries imply flu-related deaths in 1918-1920 of 39 million, 2.0 percent of world population, implying 150 million deaths when applied to current population. Regressions with annual information on flu deaths 1918-1920 and war deaths during WWI imply flu-generated economic declines for GDP and consumption in the typical country of 6 and 8 percent, respectively. There is also some evidence that higher flu death rates decreased realized real returns on stocks and, especially, on short-term government bills.

Subfields: Epidemiology, Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis, Modeling and Simulation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f5215f8903f5e81950c9dfcc67bd89e650d4bd88

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Citations in the corpus

Decline in Mobility: Public Transport in Poland in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic (2020, background): “The novel coronavirus pandemic has hit the global economy and societies on an unprecedented scale since the Great Depression (1929–1933), and is epidemically compared to the Spanish flu of the 1918 (Barro et al. 2020; Laing 2020).”
Nonlinear Production Networks with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, background): “Bonadio et al. (2020) analyze the effects of Covid-19 in an open-economy context.”
The Cost of the Covid-19 Crisis: Lockdowns, Macroeconomic Expectations, and Consumer Spending (2020, positive): “…jointly models the dynamics of the pandemic and the economy to 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…”
Sectoral Effects of Social Distancing (2020, background): “Barro et al. (2020) and Correia et al. (2020) study the 1918 Flu Pandemic in the U.S., Greenstone and Nigam (2020) study the implications of social distancing measures whereas Andrew Glover and Rıos-Rull (2020) focuses on the distribution effects of the COVID-19.”
Fiscal policy during a pandemic (2020, positive): “Excluded from the analysis are ✩454 billion that are (14)Barro et al. (2020) use data from the 1918-1920 Great Influenza Epidemic to estimate mortality rates of 2%.”
Supply and Demand in Disaggregated Keynesian Economies with an Application to the Covid-19 Crisis (2020, neutral): “…(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.…”
Firm-Level Exposure to Epidemic Diseases: Covid-19, SARS, and H1N1 (2020, neutral): “We believe these efforts to be timely given the concern in the literature that the extraordinary nature of the current crisis might have rendered existing models and policy remedies ineffective (Adda, 2016; Barro et al., 2020).”
Financial markets under the global pandemic of COVID-19 (2020, positive): “However, these policies will also lead to economic depressions around the world (Barro et al., 2020) , and quickly spreading to financial markets (Ramelli and Wagner, 2020) .”
Economic uncertainty before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020, neutral): “As of 10 July 2020, US excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic is (175,700/326.69 million) = 0.054%.6 It was an estimated 0.52% during the Spanish Flu (Barro et al., 2020, Table 1).”
Does the Indian Financial Market Nosedive because of the COVID-19 Outbreak, in Comparison to after Demonetisation and the GST? (2020, background): “…our study relates examines the effect of pandemics on financial markets (Al-Awadhi et al. 2020; Ali, Alam, and Rizvi 2020; Apergis and Apergis 2020; Barro, Ursúa, and Weng 2020; Donadelli, Kizys, and Riedel 2017; Gil-Alana and Monge 2020; Gormsen and Koijen 2020; Granger, Huang, and Yang 2000;…”