Non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been the key policy instrument utilized to contain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper disentangles the effects of NPIs from that of the virus and looks at the specific channels through which the virus impacts consumption. Using geo-located transaction data, we find that consumers' behaviour towards the virus has explanatory power for the drop in consumption in the early stages of the pandemic. This effect disappears in the later stages of the pandemic, suggesting that consumers have adapted their behaviour. As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed, consumers tended to make 'safer' consumption decisions, by avoiding crowded places.

This article studies the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on graduates and non-graduates in the United Kingdom. We construct a DSGE model with search frictions that is designed around key features of the UK labour market and simulate the model using an array of shocks, designed to mimic the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. We show that our relatively simple macroeconomic model can describe the impact of the pandemic on output, employment and wages. Our results show that the impact of the pandemic on employment and wages was more severe for non-graduates than for graduates, and that up to 5 million jobs would have been lost in the first wave of the pandemic in the absence of the Job Retention Scheme.

This paper examines the relationship between education and health behaviours, focusing on potential offsetting responses between calories (i.e. dietary intakes) and calories (i.e. physical activity). It exploits the 1972 British compulsory schooling law that raised the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 to estimate the effects of education on diet and exercise around middle age. Using a regression discontinuity design, the findings suggest that the reform led to a of the quality of the diet, with increases in total calories, fats and animal proteins. However, I find that these changes are partially offset by a discontinuous increase in physical activity. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest little effect on the balance of calories. As such, the findings show that focusing on the two components of energy balance provides additional information that is concealed in analyses that only use a measure of obesity.

Hard lockdowns have left policymakers to face the ethical dilemma of choosing between saving lives and saving the economy. However, massive testing could have helped to respond more effectively to Covid-19 crisis. In this paper, we study the trade-off between infection control, lockdown and testing. The aim is to understand how these policies can be effectively combined to contain Covid-19 without damaging the economy. An extended SIR epidemic model is developed to identify the set of testing and lockdown levels that lead to a reproduction number below one, thus to infection control and saving lives. Depending on whether the testing policy is static or dynamic, the model suggests that testing 4% to 7% of the population is the way to safely reopen the economy and the society.

We estimate a monthly interacted-VAR model for euro area macroeconomic aggregates allowing for the impact of uncertainty shocks to depend on the state of the average outlook for the economy measured by survey data. We find that, in response to an uncertainty shock, the peak decrease in industrial production and inflation is around three and a half times larger during pessimistic times. We build an assessment of the role of uncertainty for a path of innovations consistent with the increase in the observed VSTOXX measure of uncertainty since the outset of the COVID-19 epidemics in February and March 2020. Industrial production is predicted to experience a year-over-year peak loss of around 9.2% in the fourth quarter of 2020, and subsequently to recover with a rebound to pre-crisis levels roughly in June 2021. The large impact is the result of an extreme shock to uncertainty occurring at a time of very negative expectations for the economic outlook. We conduct simulations that quantify the potential benefit of recovered confidence in reducing the uncertainty-induced losses associated with a possible third wave of the pandemic.

Instrumental variables are often used to identify peer effects. This paper shows that instrumenting the 'peer average outcome' with 'peer average characteristics' requires the researcher to include the instrument at the individual level as an explanatory variable. We highlight the bias that occurs when failing to do this.

Economic theory does not always specify the functional relationship between dependent and explanatory variables, or even isolate a particular set of covariates. This means that model uncertainty is pervasive in empirical economics. In this paper, we indicate how Bayesian semi-parametric regression methods in combination with stochastic search variable selection can be used to address two model uncertainties simultaneously: (i) the uncertainty with respect to the variables which should be included in the model and (ii) the uncertainty with respect to the functional form of their effects. The presented approach enables the simultaneous identification of robust linear and nonlinear effects. The additional insights gained are illustrated on applications in empirical economics, namely willingness to pay for housing, and cross-country growth regression.

The ability to correct deficiencies in early childhood malnutrition, what is known as catch-up growth, has widespread consequences for economic and social development. While clinical evidence of catch-up has been observed, less clear is the ability to correct for chronic malnutrition found in impoverished environments in the absence of extensive and focused interventions. This paper investigates whether nutritional status at early age affects nutritional status a few years later among children using panel data from China, South Africa and Nicaragua. The key research question is the extent to which state dependence in linear growth exists among young children, and what family and community level factors mediate state dependency. The answer to this question is crucial for public policy due to the long term economic consequences of poor childhood nutrition. Results show strong but not perfect persistence in nutritional status across all countries, indicating that catch-up growth is possible though unobserved household behaviors tend to worsen the possibility of catch-up growth. Public policy that can influence these behaviors, especially when children are under 24 months old, can significantly alter nutrition outcomes in South Africa and Nicaragua.

This paper proposes two new panel unit root tests based on Zaykin et al. (2002)'s truncated product method. The first one assumes constant correlation between -values and the second one uses sieve bootstrap to allow for general forms of cross-section dependence in the panel units. Monte Carlo simulation shows that both tests have reasonably good size and are powerful in cases of some very large -values. The proposed tests are applied to a panel of real GDP and inflation density forecasts, resulting in evidence that professional forecasters may not update their forecast precision in an optimal Bayesian way.

"We show that older [UK] male pensioners have substantially lower incomes than younger pensioners.... We find that cohort differences more than account for the lower incomes of older pensioners in the sense that the mean income of older pensioners is actually higher than the mean income of the same cohort of pensioners when they were younger. We explore a number of possible reasons for this and conclude that it is driven by differential mortality between richer and poorer pensioners. We show how this manifests itself in a long time series of cross-sectional datasets."

"The purpose of this paper is to identify which regional economic factors influence male migration decisions [in Spain], taking into account personal characteristics....[We present] evidence on the importance...of the person's situation, in particular: (i) family characteristics, such as being married to a working woman, having children, or living with relatives (ii) personal factors such as education or age, and (iii) own employment situation such as being registered as unemployed as opposed to non-registered, or being self-employed."

"Various hypotheses have been put forward in recent years concerning the contribution of human capital to economic growth. This paper argues that school enrolment rates--by far the most commonly used human capital measure in growth regressions attempting to test these hypotheses--conflate human capital stock and accumulation effects and lead to misinterpretations of the role of labour force growth. An alternative education-related human capital measure is constructed which is capable of distinguishing between stocks and flows. Applying this measure to samples of developed and less developed countries during the 1960-85 period suggests not only that there are important growth effects associated both with 'initial' stocks of, and subsequent growth in, human capital, but also that this new measure out-performs the simple school enrolment rates used in previous analyses."