Welfare costs of COVID-19: Evidence from US counties

The economic impacts of COVID-19 and city lockdown: Early evidence from China

As the first major developing country heavily struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, China adopted the world's most stringent lockdown interventions to contain the virus spread. Using macro- and micro-level data, this paper shows that both the pandemic and lockdown policies have had negative and significant impacts on the economy. Gross regional product (GRP) fell by 9.5 and 0.3 percentage points in cities with and without lockdown interventions, respectively. These impacts represent a dramatic recession from China's average growth of 6.74% before the pandemic. The results indicate that lockdown explains 2.8 percentage points of the GDP loss. We also document significant spill-over effects of the pandemic in adjacent areas but no such effects of lockdown. Reduced labor mobility, land supply, and entrepreneurship are among the most significant mechanisms underpinning the impacts of the pandemic and lockdown. Cities with higher share of secondary industry, higher traffic intensity, lower population density, lower internet access, and lower fiscal capacity suffered more. However, these cities seem to have recovered well from the recession and quickly closed the economic gap in the aftermath of the pandemic and city lockdown. Our findings have broader implications for the global interventions in pandemic containment.

COVID-19 and housing prices: evidence from U.S. county-level data

This paper investigates the effects of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on housing prices at the U.S. county level. The effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices are formally investigated by using a two-way fixed effects panel regression, where county-specific factors, time-specific factors, and mobility measures of individuals are controlled for. The benchmark results show evidence for negative and significant effects of COVID-19 cases on housing prices, robust to the consideration of several permutation tests, where the negative effects are more evident in counties with higher poverty rates. Exclusion tests further suggest that U.S. counties in the state of California or the month of May 2020 are more responsible for the empirical results, although the results based on other counties and months are still in line with the benchmark results.

Effect of green bonds, oil prices, and COVID-19 on industrial CO2 emissions in the USA: Evidence from novel wavelet local multiple correlation approach

This study explores the effect of green bonds, oil prices, and the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on industrial carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In this context, this study examines the United States of America (USA), which is the biggest economy in the world, uses weekly data between March 6, 2020 and September 30, 2022, and applies a novel wavelet local multiple correlation (WLMC) approach under time-varying and frequency-varying perspective. The novel empirical findings shows that (i) there is a strong negative (positive) co-movement between industrial CO2 emissions and green bonds in the short-run (long-run); (ii) there is a strong positive (negative) co-movement between industrial CO2 emissions and oil price in the medium-run (long-run); (iii) there is a strong negative (positive) co-movement between industrial CO2 emissions and the COVID-19 pandemic in the medium-run (long-run); (iv) the oil price is the dominant factor, whereas there are changing effect of the variables on each other at different times and frequencies; and (vi) overall, there are long-run asymmetric and dynamic correlations between industrial CO2 emissions and variables. Hence, the empirical results highlight the asymmetric, time-varying, and frequency-varying effects of green bonds, oil prices, and the COVID-19 pandemic on industrial CO2 emissions by presenting fresh and novel evidence. Moreover, the study proposes policy implications for the USA government.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. entrepreneurship

We study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. entrepreneurial activities, as measured by the overall number of new business applications, high-propensity business applications, business applications from corporations, and business applications with paid wages. However, the number of business applications increased significantly after the lockdown. Also, the portion of high-propensity business applications as a share of total business applications declined considerably during and after the lockdown. Our findings could partially explain the tight labor market in the U.S. during the pandemic.