The English Patient: Evaluating Local Lockdowns Using Real-Time COVID-19 & Consumption Data

Abstract

We find UK "local lockdowns" of cities and small regions, focused on limiting how many people a household can interact with and in what settings, are effective in turning the tide on rising positive COVID-19 cases. Yet, by focusing on household mixing within the home, these local lockdowns have not inflicted the large declines in consumption accompanying the March 2020 national lockdown, which limited all social contact. Our study harnesses a new source of real-time, transaction-level consumption data that we show to be highly correlated with official statistics. The effectiveness of local lockdowns are evaluated applying a difference-in-difference approach which exploits nearby localities not subject to local lockdowns as comparison groups. Our findings indicate that policymakers may be able to contain virus outbreaks without killing local economies. However, the ultimate effectiveness of local lockdowns is expected to be highly dependent on co-ordination between regions and an effective system of testing.

The Impact of COVID-19 Restrictions on Economic Activity: Evidence from the Italian Regional System

“…Third, we contribute to the growing literature that employs high frequency mobility data to evaluate the economic consequences of the pandemic (Deb et al, 2020;Famiglietti and Leibovici, 2022). Lastly, this paper adds to the empirical literature that estimates locally differentiated restrictions on individual mobility by means of sub-national data (Caselli et al, 2020;Gathergood and Guttman-Kenney, 2020;Walker and Hurley, 2021). Our paper complements Caselli et al (2020), in particular, who esimate the effects of NPIs on mobility in Italy during the first wave of Covid-19.…”