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 …

-in-differences and a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of lockdown, we find a substantial increase in the … may have been severely affected by the lockdown. …