Covid-19
Research and Teaching
Mass Test and Trace Programmes will be more effective if workplaces run them, November 2020, LSE blog, with Tim Besley, Andrea Galeotti and Jakub Steiner.
Mortgage Market Disruptions, October 2020, Financial Conduct Authority Occasional Paper No. 57, with Philippe Bracke, Karen Croxson, Daoud Fakhri and Tommaso Valletti.
Economic Aspects of the COVID-19 Crisis in the UK, August 2020, Report prepared for the Royal Society DELVE Initiative, with several economists including my co-author Andrea Galeotti. Media: BBC1, BBC2, The Guardian, The Times.
The Distributional Impact of the Pandemic, July 2020, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 15101, with Sinem Haçioglu Hoke and Diego Känzig. Media: Financial Times.
Is the Covid-19 recession caused by supply or demand factors?, July 2020, Economic Observatory, with Alistair Macaulay.
How much will lifting lockdown start to reverse the UK’s economic slump?, June 2020, Economic Observatory, with Tim Munday.
UK Household Debt before and after the Crisis, June 2020, Wheeler Institute webinar. Slides.
Consumption in the Time of Covid-19: Evidence from UK transaction data, April 2020, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 14733, with Sinem Haçioglu Hoke and Diego Känzig.
Media: Financial Times, short video, long video, slides.
An economic approach to testing, April 2020, with Andrea Galeotti and Jakub Steiner.
Why testing a representative sample of the population must be done now, April 2020, with Andrea Galeotti. Media: RAI RADIO.
A rule of thumb to detect excess deaths? Lessons from Italy, April 2020, with Andrea Galeotti and Sebastian Hohmann. Media: RAI 1.
A User Guide to Covid-19: gathering the facts, health policies and macroeconomic implications, March 2020, with Andrea Galeotti, updated daily.
Popular writing and further analysis
Covid-19 is the largest health and economic crisis of our generation. We are all bombarded by a lot of news, which are evolving quickly, are often highly technical, and have policy consequences that dramatically affect our lives.
Andrea Galeotti and I felt the need to learn some tools to process this information and to understand and rationalise current health and economic policies. We created a narrative to highlight different trade-offs which are part of: a) every health policy that attempts to flatten the contagion curve of Covid-19, and b) every economic policy that attempts to flatten the 'recession curve' caused by Covid-19.
We thought to share the outcome of this exercise with you: A user guide to Covid-19. It consists of four mini-lectures (each with slides and a video):
• A user guide of Covid-19: part I: gathering facts. [Video, Slides]
Reporting the facts that are available to us all, in a way that is concise, precise and accessible to a large audience.
• A user guide of Covid-19: part II: epidemiology for dummies. [Video, Slides]
Explaining, in simple but precise terms, the epidemiology models that are guiding governmental health policies. Discussing trade-offs in health policies that implement different degrees of social distancing.
• A user guide of Covid-19: part III: economics for dummies. [Video, Slides]
Explaining, in simple but precise terms, the economic mechanisms behind the new economic crisis due to Covid-19.
• A user guide of Covid-19: part IV: policy options. [Video, Slides]
Discussing health and economic policy options in view of the current situation.
A file containing the full set of slides is here: Lecture on Covid-19.
A version of the slides in Italian can be found here. This is a rapidly evolving situation so we are updating the lecture slides (almost) daily.
*Financial support from the European Research Council and the Wheeler Institute is gratefully acknowledged. Luis Fonseca, Sarah Pavlu and Francesco Amodeo have provided excellent assistance.
