National Bureau of Economic Research

This research studies the interaction between economic decisions and epidemics. The model implies that people’s decision to cut back on consumption and work reduces the severity of the epidemic, as measured by total deaths. These decisions exacerbate the size of the recession caused by the epidemic.

This paper identifies three indicators – stock market volatility, newspaper-based economic uncertainty, and subjective uncertainty in business expectation surveys – that provide real-time forward-looking uncertainty measures and illustrate how they can be used to assess the macroeconomic impact of the COVID-19 crisis. It implies a year-on-year contraction in US real GDP of nearly 11 per cent as of 2020 Q4