论文标题
大流行，关闭和消费者支出：斯堪的纳维亚政策回应的经验教训
Pandemic, Shutdown and Consumer Spending: Lessons from Scandinavian Policy Responses to COVID-19
论文作者
论文摘要
本文使用来自斯堪的纳维亚半岛的大型银行的交易数据来估算社会疏远法律对COVID-19大流行中消费者支出的影响。该分析利用了一个自然的实验来消除病毒的影响以及旨在遏制该病毒的法律：丹麦和瑞典类似地暴露于大流行，但只有丹麦对社会和经济活动施加了重大限制。我们估计，瑞典的总支出下降了约25％，并且由于关闭的原因，丹麦的额外支出增加了4个百分点。这意味着大多数经济收缩是由病毒本身引起的，并且无论社会疏远法律如何。估计中的年龄梯度表明，社会距离增强了病毒引起的低健康风险个体支出下降，但通过降低社会病毒的整体患病率来减轻高风险个体的支出。
This paper uses transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25 percent in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points in Denmark. This implies that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of social distancing laws. The age gradient in the estimates suggest that social distancing reinforces the virus-induced drop in spending for low health-risk individuals but attenuates it for high-risk individuals by lowering the overall prevalence of the virus in the society.
