When South Africa implemented its non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) (its "lockdown") to stem the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, it was hailed as exemplary. By June 2020 however, the lockdown was in disarray: the number of confirmed infections continued to grow exponentially, placing the...

We study how intentions to comply with the self-isolation restrictions enacted in Italy in response to the COVID-19 crisis respond to the length of their possible extension. Based on a survey of a representative sample of Italian residents (N=894), we find that respondents who are positively...

It is politicians who have to decide when to release the lockdown, and in what way. In doing so, they have to balance many considerations (as with any decision). Often the different considerations appear incommensurable so that only the roughest of judgements can be made. For example, in the...

While degraded trust and cohesion within a country are often shown to have large socioeconomic impacts, they can also have dramatic consequences when compliance is required for collective survival. We illustrate this point in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Policy responses all over the...

Better understanding whether and how communities respond to government decisions is crucial for policy makers and health officials in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we document the socioeconomic determinants of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders' compliance in the U.S. Using cell...

In March 2020, shelter-in-place and social-distancing policies have been enforced or recommended all over the world to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. However, strict containment is hardly achievable in low-income countries, as large parts of population are forced to continue income-generating...

We explore the role of social capital in the spread of the recent Covid-19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. Exploiting within-country variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in social capital leads to...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...

We estimate the economic impact of South Korea's targeted responses to the first large-scale COVID-19 cluster in Seoul. We find that foot traffic and retail sales decreased only within a 300 meter radius of the cluster and recovered to its pre-outbreak level after four weeks. The reductions...

This paper studies the dynamics of human mobility during the initial stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in countries around the world. The main goal of the analysis is to empirically separate voluntary reductions in mobility driven by the information about the location-specific pandemic trends from...