Social Interactions in Pandemics: Fear, Altruism, and Reciprocity

Abstract

, as well as various seminar participants for their comments and suggestions. All errors are our own responsibility. 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 peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

What Jobs are Being Done at Home During the COVID-19 Crisis? Evidence from Firm-Level Surveys

“…The COVID pandemic led to dramatic economic disruptions, as health concerns created by the virus have led people to stay at home (Alfaro et al 2020, Bartik et al 2020, Balla-Elliot et al 2020, Beland et al 2020. As our results explore, the pandemic also led to a dramatic departure in the way work is conducted -with a sharp but uneven rise in remote work.…”

Globalization and Pandemics

“…Within this literature, a few papers have explored the spatial dimension of the COVID-19 pandemic by simulating multi-group SIR models applied to various urban and regional contexts (see, among others, Argente et al, 2020, Bisin and Moro, 2020, Cuñat and Zymek, 2020, Birge et al, 2020, and Fajgelbaum et al, 2020. Our paper also connects with a subset of that literature, exemplified by the work of Alfaro et al (2020), Farboodi et al (2020), Fenichel et al (2011), and Toxvaerd (2020) that has studied how the behavioral response of agents (e.g., social distancing) affects the spread and persistence of pandemics. Whereas most of this research is concerned with COVID-19 and adopts a simulation approach, our main goal is to develop a model of human interaction that jointly provides a microfoundation for a gravity equation and multi-group SIR dynamics, and can be used to analytically characterize the two-way relationship between globalization and pandemics in general.…”

Learning Epidemiology by Doing: The Empirical Implications of a Spatial Sir Model with Behavioral Responses

“…The spatial dimensions we account for in the present paper introduce a form of local interactions in the contact process between agents. Related extensions of SIR along these lines include those that explicitly model the dynamics of an epidemic on networks, as Azzimonti et al (2020), Acemoglu et al (2020a), Alfaro et al (2020) and those allowing for heterogeneity of the contact process between subpopulations, as Ellison (2020).…”