Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
8-2022
Abstract
In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain COVID-19 transmission can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown. To formalize and quantify this effect, we build a macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model that features heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality and calibrate it to data for 85 countries across all income levels. We find that in some low-income countries, a lockdown can produce net increases in mortality. The optimal lockdown that maximizes the present value of aggregate social welfare is shorter and milder in poorer countries than in rich ones.
Keywords
COVID-19, child mortality, lockdown, SIR-macro
Discipline
Economics | Health Economics | Public Health
Research Areas
Macroeconomics
Publication
International Economic Review
Volume
63
Issue
3
First Page
1427
Last Page
1468
ISSN
0020-6598
Identifier
10.1111/iere.12574
Publisher
Wiley
Citation
MA, Lin; SHAPIRA, Gil; DE WALQUE, Damien; DO, Quy-Toan; FRIEDMAN, Jed; and LEVCHENKO, Andrei A..
The intergenerational mortality tradeoff of COVID-19 lockdown policies. (2022). International Economic Review. 63, (3), 1427-1468.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soe_research/2607
Copyright Owner and License
Publisher
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1111/iere.12574