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Causal Impact of Masks, Policies, Behavior on Early Covid-19 Pandemic in the U.S

Victor Chernozhukov, Hiroyuki Kasaha, Paul Schrimpf

arXiv 28 May 2020 · Econometrics · 206 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:2005.14168 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper evaluates the dynamic impact of various policies adopted by US states on the growth rates of confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths as well as social distancing behavior measured by Google Mobility Reports, where we take into consideration people's voluntarily behavioral response to new information of transmission risks. Our analysis finds that both policies and information on transmission risks are important determinants of Covid-19 cases and deaths and shows that a change in policies explains a large fraction of observed changes in social distancing behavior. Our counterfactual experiments suggest that nationally mandating face masks for employees on April 1st could have reduced the growth rate of cases and deaths by more than 10 percentage points in late April, and could have led to as much as 17 to 55 percent less deaths nationally by the end of May, which roughly translates into 17 to 55 thousand saved lives. Our estimates imply that removing non-essential business closures (while maintaining school closures, restrictions on movie theaters and restaurants) could have led to -20 to 60 percent more cases and deaths by the end of May. We also find that, without stay-at-home orders, cases would have been larger by 25 to 170 percent, which implies that 0.5 to 3.4 million more Americans could have been infected if stay-at-home orders had not been implemented. Finally, not having implemented any policies could have led to at least a 7 fold increase with an uninformative upper bound in cases (and deaths) by the end of May in the US, with considerable uncertainty over the effects of school closures, which had little cross-sectional variation.

Citation extraction

86
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117
in-text mentions
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distinct cited
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appendix boundary found by appendix_command · 87% of the source is main text. Read the extracted text to check this.

Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Howard, Jeremy, Austin Huang, Zhiyuan Li, Zeynep Tufekci, Vladimir Z… (2020) Face Masks Against COVID-19: An Evidence Review0.81142100%
2Raifman, Julia, Kristen Nocka, David Jones, Jacob Bor, Sarah Ketchen… (2020) COVID-19 US state policy database0.6445240%
3Greenhalgh, Trisha, Manuel B Schmid, Thomas Czypionka, Dirk Bassler,… (2020) Face masks for the public during the covid-19 crisis0.64422100%
4Abaluck, Jason, Judith A. Chevalier, Nicholas A. Christakis, Howard… (2020) The Case for Universal Cloth Mask Adoption and Policies to Increase Supply of Medical Masks for Health Workers0.64422100%
5Chen, Shuowen, Victor Chernozhukov, and Iván Fernández-Val (2019) Mastering panel metrics: causal impact of democracy on growth self0.64422100%
6Chetty, Raj, John N Friedman, Nathaniel Hendren, and Michael Stepner (2020) Real-Time Economics: A New Platform to Track the Impacts of COVID-19 on People, Businesses, and Communities Using Private Sector…0.64422100%
7Maloney, William F. and Temel Taskin (2020) Determinants of Social Distancing and Economic Activity during COVID-19: A Global View0.64422100%
8Zhang, Renyi, Yixin Li, Annie L. Zhang, Yuan Wang, and Mario J. Molina (2020) Identifying airborne transmission as the dominant route for the spread of COVID-190.64422100%
9Courtemanche, Charles, Joseph Garuccio, Anh Le, Joshua Pinkston, and… (2020) Strong Social Distancing Measures In The United States Reduced The COVID-19 Growth Rate0.58531100%
10Hsiang, Solomon, Daniel Allen, Sebastien Annan-Phan, Kendon Bell, Ia… (2020) The Effect of Large-Scale Anti-Contagion Policies on the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic0.58531100%

Showing the top 10 of 86 scored citations.

Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Inference under Superspreading: Determinants of SARS-CoV-2 Transmission in Germany0.69371
2Sparse HP Filter: Finding Kinks in the COVID-19 Contact Rate0.40511
3On the Use of Two-Way Fixed Effects Models for Policy Evaluation During Pandemics0.40511
4Estimating Causal Effects with Double Machine Learning - A Method Evaluation0.00011