New Working Paper: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Policies Against a Pandemic (Alexander Ludwig)
23.10.2020
We develop a novel empirical approach to evaluate the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The key insight is that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than over time. Our approach uncovers variation in stages across regions and gives clean identification of the policy effect. We apply our approach to evaluate the effectiveness of the nationwide stay-home policy enacted in Spain against Covid-19. We find that the policy saved 15.9% of lives. Comments are welcome!