ArticleJournal of public economics2021
Fear, lockdown, and diversion: Comparing drivers of pandemic economic decline 2020.
Article in Journal of public economics, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 193 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
193 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 745 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on antibiotic consumption: A systematic review comparing 2019 and 2020 data.Frontiers in public health · 2022Pooled it
- Association of pandemic-era US county-level policies with adult health and health behaviors.SSM - population health · 2026Article
- Heterogeneous impacts of fear and policy on building energy use during COVID-19 in South Korea.iScience · 2026Article
- Inferring mobility reductions from COVID-19 disease spread along the urban-rural gradient.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Public health system credibility and corporate financial risk: behavioral channels from China.Frontiers in public health · 2026Article
- Optimal pandemic control strategies and cost-effectiveness of COVID-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions in the United States.BMC global and public health · 2025Article
- Back to school: The effect of school visits during COVID-19 on COVID-19 outcomes.Journal of health economics · 2025Article
- Explaining international differences in excess mortality due to Covid-19.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- The Impact of Stay-At-Home Mandates on Uncertainty and Sentiments: Quasi-Experimental Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Article
- What drives the effectiveness of social distancing in combating COVID-19 across U.S. states?PloS one · 2025Article
- Economic Epidemiology: A Framework to Study Interactions of Epidemics and the Economy.Applied health economics and health policy · 2024Article
- Automated local lockdowns for SARS-CoV-2 epidemic control-assessment of effect by controlled interrupted time series analysis.IJID regions · 2024Article
- COVID-19 School Closures Were Associated With A Decline In Employment For Female Nurses With Young Children.Health affairs (Project Hope) · 2024Article
- Three years of COVID-19-related school restrictions and mental health of children and adolescents in Japan.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Epidemiological approaches to multivariable models of health inequity: A study of race, rurality, and occupation during the COVID-19 pandemic.Annals of epidemiology · 2024Article
- Review
- THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF COVID-19: EVIDENCE FROM A NEW PUBLIC DATABASE BUILT USING PRIVATE SECTOR DATA.The quarterly journal of economics · 2024Article
- Consumption responses to an unconditional child allowance in the United States.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Parameter estimation in behavioral epidemic models with endogenous societal risk-response.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
133 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that collapse resulted from government-imposed restrictions versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the economic slowdown using cellular phone records data on customer visits to more than 2.25 million individual businesses across 110 different industries. Comparing consumer behavior over the crisis within the same commuting zones but across state and county boundaries with different policy regimes suggests that legal shutdown orders account for only a modest share of the massive changes to consumer behavior (and that tracking county-level policy conditions is significantly more accurate than using state-level policies alone). While overall consumer traffic fell by 60 percentage points, legal restrictions explain only 7 percentage points of this. Individual choices were far more important and seem tied to fears of infection. Traffic started dropping before the legal orders were in place; was highly influenced by the number of COVID deaths reported in the county; and showed a clear shift by consumers away from busier, more crowded stores toward smaller, less busy stores in the same industry. States that repealed their shutdown orders saw symmetric, modest recoveries in consumer visits, further supporting the small estimated effect of policy. Although the shutdown orders had little aggregate impact, they did have a significant effect in reallocating consumer visits away from "nonessential" to "essential" businesses and from restaurants and bars toward groceries and other food sellers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.