Were Urban Cowboys Enough to Control COVID-19? Local Shelter-in-Place Orders and Coronavirus Case Growth

Abstract

including grant funding received from the Charles Koch Foundation and Troesh Family Foundation. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

When Do Shelter-in-Place Orders Fight COVID-19 Best? Policy Heterogeneity Across States and Adoption Time

“…The mean number of cumulative cases of coronavirus in the average SIPO-adopting state over our sample period was 5,744 (for the full sample, this number was 5,501). 6 This is consistent with findings from a case-study of county-level orders in Texas(Dave et al 2020).…”

“…38 Appendix Table 8 explores heterogeneity in the efficacy of SIPOs based on whether or not the state in question had a nonessential business closure or local SIPOs covering over 50 percent of the state population in place prior to the statewide SIPO. Statewide SIPOs are less effective when these other policies are enacted first, for further discussion of this phenomenon see Dave et al (2020). 39 Appendix Table 9 conducts a similar analysis to Table 8A, instead splitting states into groups based on their average daily growth rate of COVID-19 cases prior to their SIPO as a proxy for how early or late their adoption was…”

Private Precaution and Public Restrictions: What Drives Social Distancing and Industry Foot Traffic in the COVID-19 Era?

“…In response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, many state and local governments have adopted a series of orders that encourage social distancing. A variety of scholars have examined the impact of these orders, including Alexander and Karger (2020), Abouk and Heydari (2020), Dave et al (2020a and2020b), Gupta et al (2020), and Goolsbee and Syverson (2020). The focal point for many has been stay at home (henceforth, SAH) restrictions that ask people to shelter in place unless it is necessary to go out.…”

“…We contribute to an expanding economics literature on the impact of government policies to encourage social distancing in the wake of COVID-19. Using a variety of econometric techniques, authors have argued that SAH restrictions increased social distancing by roughly 40% 2-3 weeks after implementation (Abouk and Heydari, 2020;Dave et al, 2020a), which reduced consumer activity (Alexander and Karger, 2020) and case incidence rates (Friedson et al, 2020;Dave et al, 2020aDave et al, , 2020b. However, Gupta et al (2020) show that SAH restrictions, which occur late relative to other policies, account for a small share of the total decline in mobility.…”

Risk Aversion, Offsetting Community Effects, and COVID-19: Evidence from an Indoor Political Rally

“…Social distancing among the general population may be particularly important to the extent that infectious individuals are asymptomatic (Bai et al, 2020;Pan et al, 2020;Rothe et al, 2020). There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that public policies mandating social distancing and mask wearing played an important role in fighting the spread of COVID-19 (Courtemanche et al 2020a(Courtemanche et al , 2020bDave et al 2020aDave et al , 2020bDave et al , 2020cFriedson et al 2020, Sears et al 2020Lyu and Wehby 2020).…”