Countries worldwide have implemented lockdown measures to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. After more than three months … while keeping the epidemic in check. Here I use basic economic principles to shed light on the key tradeoffs. A central … message is that there is no “health vs. economics” dichotomy. Rather, some degree of lockdown is typically optimal in crisis …

with endogenous dynamics for the pandemic. There are three main results. First, the macroeconomic effects of the epidemic … measure to 35 percent with a strong containment measure; second, recovery from recession emerges when the lockdown policy is … relaxed. On that basis, the output would return to its pre-lockdown level by the end of 2021; third, a return infection is …

We embed a lockdown choice in a simplified epidemiological model and derive formulas for the optimal lockdown intensity … discovery, learning effects in the health care sector, and the severity of output losses due to a lockdown. In our baseline …

This paper provides a critical review of models of the spread of the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that have been …

measures adopted by the German government. Based on a spatio-temporal endemic-epidemic model we show that in retrospective … in Germany on the early stages of the epidemic, is not optimal …

remove concurrent policy bias from the effect of each policy of interest, and we establish that policies curb the epidemic by …

This paper reexamines the design of the optimal lockdown strategy by paying attention to its robustness to the … postulated social welfare criterion. We first characterize optimal lockdown under utilitarianism, and we show that this social …-maximal lockdown saving lives at the cost of reducing average utility at a given period, there exists always a stricter lockdown, which …