Support for this research comes from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The US is amongst the worst-performing countries at combating COVID-19. And within the US, red (Republican) states have significantly higher cases per capita than blue (Democratic) states. We use cross-country, state, and county-level data to provide a comprehensive analysis of economic, political, and psychological factors contributing to these differences. An inferior social safety net and American conservatism systematically correlate with the realization and effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing and mask wearing from April to September. Economic inequality and weak social safety nets drive the economically vulnerable to work outside their homes, increasing mobility and reducing social distancing during early stages of the pandemic. Conservative ideology, anti-intellectualism, and evangelicalism drive people to politicize social distancing and mask wearing. Both factors predict a premature reopening in many states, and have a strong correlation with the drifting of COVID-19 epicenters to red states over the course of 2020. These factors have more explanatory power than partisanship in the first half year of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. However, from October on, closer to the presidential elections, partisanship is a better predictor of anti-COVID measures and explains well the regional variances of confirmed cases across states and counties. This indicates that partisanship is not the solely important factor in determining COVID-19 response and outcome, but its impact is likely to have been magnified as time goes by.
Support for the research reported in this paper was provided by the Columbia Business school Faculty Research Fund. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.
The COVID-19 vaccination rate among children ages 5–11 is low in the U.S., with parental vaccine hesitancy being the primary cause. Current work suggests that safety and side effect concerns are the primary reasons for such vaccine hesitancy. This study explores whether this hesitancy can be mitigated with information interventions. Based on theories of health decision making and persuasion, we designed four information interventions with varying contents and lengths. We wrote two messages on vaccine safety (a detailed safety-long message and a succinct safety-short message), explaining the vaccine’s lower dosage, low rate of side effects, and the rigorous approval process. We also had two messages on protection effects (protect-family, protect-child). We combined these four messages with a vaccine-irrelevant control message and compared their effects on parental vaccine intention. We measured the parental vaccination intention using a 0–6 Likert scale question. Among the four intervention groups, we found that the short version of the safety message increased the average vaccination intention by over 1 point compared to the control arm, while the other three interventions failed to show significance. Specifically, these effects are particularly pronounced (around 2 points) for Republican parents who had a much lower initial intention to vaccinate their children. Our study highlights the importance of concise and to-the-point information rendering in promoting public health activities and therefore has important policy implications for raising vaccination intentions among parents, especially those leaning towards more conservative political affiliation.
We study a Bayesian Persuasion game with multiple senders employing conditionally independent experiments. Senders have zero-sum preferences over what information is revealed. We characterize when a set of states cannot be pooled in any equilibrium, and in particular, when the state is (fully) revealed in every equilibrium. The state must be fully revealed in every equilibrium if and only if sender utility functions are sufficiently nonlinear. In the binary-state case, the state is fully revealed in every equilibrium if and only if some sender has nontrivial preferences.Our takeaway is that 'most' zero-sum sender preferences result in full revelation.
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