Lives or Livelihoods? Perceived Tradeoffs and Public Demand for Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions

Abstract

We study the role of cost-benefit considerations in driving public acceptance of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a large-scale online survey experiment with a representative sample of the US population, we introduce exogenous variation in the perceived economic costs and health benefits of shutdown measures by informing a random half of our sample about relevant research evidence. We find that a one standard deviation decrease in perceived economic costs (increase in perceived health benefits) of shutdown measures increases the preferred shutdown length by 13 (11) days. These effects are substantial, corresponding to two times the effect of having a Covid at-risk condition and to approximately half of the Democrat-Republican difference in the support of NPIs. Individuals with an acute and immediate personal exposure to the crisis, either in the form of health at-risk conditions or job loss, however, are less responsive to cost-benefit considerations. Our results provide insights into the mechanisms determining public acceptance of pandemic response measures.

The health-economy trade-off during the Covid-19 pandemic: Communication matters

“…However, this does not imply causation since it is possible that unobserved factors associated with both the perceived trade-off and compliance cause a spurious correlation between these two variables. Thus, in order to gain a better understanding of the extent to which preferences regarding the health-economy trade-off causally affect adherence with prescribed behaviors, following [ 49 ], we adopt an instrumental variable approach. This strategy strongly relies on the availability of a valid instrument, that is a variable that (1) affects the endogenous variable (relevance) but (2) shows no independent association with the outcome variable for reasons beyond its effect on the endogenous regressor (exclusion restriction) and (3) does not share common causes with the outcome variable (independence).…”

“…More importantly, they also find that individuals choosing the maximum valuation of health over economy are more likely to comply with recommended behaviors. Likewise, [ 49 ] study the role of cost-benefit considerations in shaping support for mandatory social distancing and stay-at-home measures by varying information on perceived economic costs and health benefits in an experimental setting. However, to the best of our knowledge, no previous paper so far has focused on the role of communication in shaping individual preferences on this trade-off.…”

Face Mask Use and Physical Distancing before and after Mandatory Masking: Evidence from Public Waiting Lines

“…Settele and Shupe (2020) provide evidence from survey data that support for policies critically depends on the information and perceptions that individuals hold.…”

Designing Information Provision Experiments

“…Information experiments are also commonly used to study how information affects policy attitudes, such as people's demand for redistribution (Alesina et al, 2018c;Chen et al, 2016;Cruces et al, 2013;Fehr et al, 2021Fehr et al, , 2019Gärtner et al, 2019;Hoy and Mager, 2018;Karadja et al, 2017;Kuziemko et al, 2015), their support for government spending (Lergetporer et al, 2018a;Roth et al, 2021a), their views on educational inequality (Lergetporer et al, 2020) and tuition fees (Lergetporer et al, 2016), their support for immigration (Alesina et al, 2018a;Bansak et al, 2016;Barrera et al, 2020;Facchini et al, 2016;Grigorieff et al, 2020;Haaland and Roth, 2020;Hopkins et al, 2019;Lergetporer et al, 2017), their tendency to discriminate against immigrants (Alesina et al, 2018b), their support for affirmative action (Haaland and Roth, 2021;Settele, 2020), or affective party polarization (Ahler and Sood, 2018). In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, Settele and Shupe (2020) study the role of beliefs for supporting lockdown measures and Rafkin et al (2021) study determinants of inference from official government projections.…”

“…For example, the partisan gap in beliefs about the current unemployment rate shrinks when respondents receive prediction incentives. 6 Relatedly, Settele (2020) shows that gender differences in reported beliefs about the gender wage gap shrink in the presence of incentives. Peterson and Iyengar (2020) find a moderate reduction in partisan differences in beliefs on topics such as climate change, immigration, or firearms when survey respondents are provided with incentives and Berinsky (2018) finds small effects of incentives on respondents' tendency to endorse political rumors.…”