COVID-19

Angus Deaton Boston Review talks with Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton about COVID-19, the relationship between culture, financial hardship, and health, and why capitalism’s flaws are proving fatal for America’s working class. Read more> 

Luis Garicano The idea that Europe’s response to the economic crisis should be based on the issuance of common perpetual bonds has been slowly gaining ground, but proposals that entail substantial increases to member states’ debt risk hampering growth for decades to come. This column argues that the time has come for genuine European spending […] 

Olivier Coibion, Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and Michael Weber We study how the differential timing of local lockdowns due to COVID-19 causally affects households’ spending and macroeconomic expectations at the local level using several waves of a customized survey with more than 10,000 respondents. While lockdowns have pronounced effects on local economic conditions and households’ expectations, they […] 

Veronica Guerrieri, Guido Lorenzoni, Ludwig Straub, Iván Werning The Covid-19 pandemic and the policies taken to control its spread have many features of an aggregate supply shock, as workers who stay home are prevented from producing goods and services. This column argues that when a supply shock asymmetrically affects different sectors of the economy, it […] 

Economic damage from the virus and lockdowns will ultimately fall disproportionately hard on low- and middle-income countries. A temporary standstill on sovereign debt payments by low- and middle-income countries to all official and private creditors to give those countries space to cover the immediate costs of the crisis would benefit advanced economies. Export restrictions on […] 

Economic damage from the virus and lockdowns will ultimately fall disproportionately hard on low- and middle-income countries. A temporary standstill on sovereign debt payments by low- and middle-income countries to all official and private creditors to give those countries space to cover the immediate costs of the crisis would benefit advanced economies. Export restrictions on […] 

Wave 2 Researchers at the Poverty Lab and the Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation at the University of Chicago are releasing the second wave of results from a longitudinal survey, which studies a representative sample of American households to understand the impact the COVID-19 crisis is having on their lives. Read more 

Patrick Bolton, Lee Buchheit , Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, Mitu Gulati, Chang-Tai Hsieh, Ugo Panizza, Beatrice Weder di Mauro Many low- and middle-income countries may face problems servicing their external debts while addressing the COVID-19 emergency. Urgent action is needed to prevent disorderly defaults and litigations. This column presents a mechanism to implement a debt standstill which […] 

Maryam Farboodi, Gregor Jarosch, Robert Shimer Analysis of a conventional dynamic economic model integrating individual optimization, equilibrium interactions, and policy analysis into the canonical epidemiological model highlights three key features of the optimal policy in a pandemic: it imposes immediate, discontinuous social distancing; it keeps social distancing in place for a long time or until […] 

Current institutional arrangements mean that small firms will be able to renegotiate with creditors and landlords to avoid bankruptcy during the lockdown. A program that allows small businesses to skip rent and utilities during the lockdown, but repay them slowly over time afterwards, would be a net benefit to the economy. Read more>