April 2, 2020: Coronavirus in your backyard

Apr 2

Good morning,

A short update today, my time has been occupied by another project with a tight deadline. Things should be back to normal tomorrow.

Coronavirus in your backyard

From a paper released yesterday by my brother and his fellow econ grad students at the University of Wisconsin:

We find that a rise of local infection rate from 0% to 0.003% is associated with a reduction in mobility by 7.44%. An official stay-at-home restriction order corresponds to reducing mobility by 6.71%.

Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s an official stay-at-home order or simply the presence of local coronavirus cases, both are correlated with a reduction of movement as measured by GPS data.

Seems like everyone and their brother (sorry for the bad joke) have shifted their focus to COVID-19 these days.

If you want to inform similar future research, check out https://covid19.eurekaplatform.org/.