Countries across the world responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with what might well be the set of biggest state-led mobility and activity restrictions in the history of humankind. But how effective were these measures across countries? Compared to multiple recent studies that document an association between such restrictions and the control of the contagion, we use an instrumental variable approach to estimate the causal effect of these restrictions on mobility, and the growth rate of confirmed cases and deaths during the first wave of the pandemic. Using the level of stringency in the rest of the world to predict the level of stringency of the restriction measures in a country, we show while stricter contemporaneous measures affected mobility, stringency in seven to fourteen days mattered most for containing the contagion. Heterogeneity analysis, by various institutional inequalities, reveals that even though the restrictions reduced mobility more in relatively less-developed countries, the causal effect of a reduction in mobility was higher in more developed countries. We propose several explanations. Our results highlight the need to complement mobility and activity restrictions with other health and information measures, especially in less-developed countries, to combat the COVID-19 pandemic effectively.
The paper examines the causal effect of education on time preference. To define our measure of time preference, we use responses to hypothetical questions involving inter-temporal trade-offs from the Indonesian Family Life Survey. We instrument years of education with exposure to the Indonesian IN-PRES primary school construction program of the 1970s that caused exogenous variations in the cost of going to school. The local average treatment effect of the program was a nine percentage point decrease in the probability of a female respondent choosing the most impatient response for every additional year of schooling. The results are robust to alternative definitions of the time preference measures but sensitive to changes in samples and specifications. The findings add to the evidence on the endogeneity of individual preferences parameters that are often taken to be constant in neoclassical economics.
The rise in healthcare spending worldwide has raised concerns regarding its sustainability (Böhm et al., 2021; World Bank, 2018). While the rising needs of an aging population and costly technological improvements are some unavoidable driving factors, the burden of preventable lifestyle diseases forms a significant portion of these costs (
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