Highlights Degraded trust and cohesion within a country have large socioeconomic impacts but also present risk for collective survival in the face of a pandemic Human mobility decreases in Europe during generalized lockdowns in March 2020 The shelter-in-place policy is significantly more effective, i.e. mobility reduction in non-necessary activities is larger, in regions with higher levels of political trust Mobility reduction is positively related to the daily stringency of national policies and this association is stronger in high-trust regions The trust effect also translates in large differences in terms of COVID-19 mortality growth rate.

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent nonprofit organization supported by Deutsche Post Foundation. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its international network, workshops and conferences, data service, project support, research visits and doctoral program. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SIZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. A revised version may be available directly from the author.IZA Discussion Paper No. 6735 July 2012 ABSTRACTComparing Labor Supply Elasticities in Europe and the US: New Results *We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the US, separately by gender and marital status. Measurement differences are netted out by using a harmonized empirical approach and comparable data sources. We find that own-wage elasticities are relatively small and much more uniform across countries than previously thought. Differences exist nonetheless and are found not to arise from different tax-benefit systems or demographic compositions across countries. Thus, we cannot reject that countries have genuinely different preferences. Three other results, important for welfare analysis, are consistent over all countries: the extensive (participation) margin dominates the intensive (hours) margin; for singles, this leads to larger labor supply responses in low-income groups; income elasticities are extremely small everywhere. Finally, the results for cross-wage elasticities in couples are opposed between regions, consistent with complementarity in spouses' leisure in the US versus substitution in spouses' household production in Europe.JEL Classification: C25, C52, H31, J22

To assess the impact of tax-bene…t policy changes on income distribution over time, we suggest a methodology based on counterfactual simulations. We start by decomposing changes in inequality/poverty indices into three contributions: reforms of the tax-bene…t structure (rules, rates, etc.), changes in nominal levels of market incomes and tax-bene…t parameters (bene…t amounts, tax bands, etc.), and all other changes in the underlying population (market income inequality, demographic composition, employment level, etc.). Then, the decomposition helps to extract an absolute measure of the impact of tax-bene…t changes on inequality when evaluated against a distributionally-neutral benchmark, i.e. a situation where tax-bene…t parameters are adjusted in line with income growth.We apply this measure to assess recent policy changes in twelve European countries. Finally, the full decomposition allows quantifying the relative role of policy changes compared to all other factors. We provide an illustration on France and Ireland and check the sensitivity of the results to the decomposition order.Key Words : Tax-bene…t policy, inequality, poverty, decomposition, microsimulation. JEL Classi…cation : H23, H53, I32Acknowledgement: We are grateful to Tony Atkinson and Brian Nolan for useful comments. We are indebted to all past and current members of the EUROMOD consortium as well as to those involved in the development of the model. Any remaining errors, results produced, interpretations or views presented are the authors' responsibility. Simulations performed in this study rely on national micro-data sets and on the European Community Household Panel