Does Precise Case Information Limit Precautionary Behavior? Evidence from COVID-19 in Singapore

Abstract

Limiting the spread of contagious diseases can involve both government-managed and voluntary efforts. Governments have a number of policy options beyond direct intervention that can shape individuals' responses to a pandemic and its associated costs. During its first wave of COVID-19 cases, Singapore was among a few countries that attempted to adjust behavior through the public provision of detailed case information. Singapore's Ministry of Health maintained and shared precise, daily information detailing local travel behavior and residences of COVID-19 cases. We use this transparency policy along with device-level cellphone data to quantify how local and national COVID-19 case announcements trigger differential behavioral changes. We find evidence that individuals are three times more responsive to outbreaks in granularly defined locales. Conditional on keeping infection rates at a manageable level, the results suggest economic value in this type of transparency by mitigating precautionary activity reductions.

Public responses to COVID‐19 case disclosure and their spatial implications

“…Estimation results report that one additional COVID‐19 case during the last 14 days decreased nonresident inflow and retail spending by 0.40 and 0.65 percentage points, respectively. Our results are consistent with Janssen and Shapiro (2020), who find a significant reduction in the probability of individuals to visit the subregion with more cases disclosed 1 day before in Singapore. They find that an additional resident and visitor case decreases the individual's probability of visiting the subregion by 0.081 and 0.017 percentage points, respectively.…”

“…Argente et al (2020) and Janssen and Shapiro (2020) are among few examples that analyze mobility outcomes of disclosed location information of COVID‐19 cases in the contexts of Seoul and Singapore, respectively. However, their outcomes of interest differ from ours.…”

“…Although the COVID‐19 outbreak is a seemingly exogenous shock, we should still be concerned about the presence of other concurrent shocks to neighborhoods and households within Seoul. To overcome such an identification challenge, most existing research on the outcomes of the COVID‐19 pandemic uses either the difference‐in‐difference approach (e.g., Chetty et al, 2020) or the estimation of year‐over‐year (or month‐over‐month/day‐over‐day) changes in outcomes with some fixed effects (e.g., Janssen & Shapiro, 2020). For our analysis, we choose the latter approach to estimate the causal effects because we assume that case location disclosure arrives as exogenous shocks after we control for date‐ and neighborhood‐specific trends of mobility and retail spending.…”

Public Responses to COVID-19 Case Disclosure and Their Spatial Implications

“…Estimation results report that one additional COVID-19 case during the last 14 days decreased nonresident inflow and retail spending by 0.40 and 0.65 percentage points, respectively. Our results are consistent with Janssen and Shapiro (2020), who find a significant reduction in the probability of individuals to visit the subregion with more cases disclosed 1 day before in Singapore.…”

“…Mobility trends in the United States are less comparable with our results because some US states used official stay-at-home order from time to time (Brough et al, 2021). (e.g., Chetty et al, 2020) or the estimation of year-over-year (or month-over-month/day-over-day) changes in outcomes with some fixed effects (e.g., Janssen & Shapiro, 2020). For our analysis, we choose the latter approach to estimate the causal effects because we assume that case location disclosure arrives as exogenous shocks after we control for dateand neighborhood-specific trends of mobility and retail spending.…”