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Large Scale Experiments Webinar Series - Sinan Aral

Cambridge-INET, Prof. Sanjeev Goyal and Dr. Frederic Moisan are hosting a series of webinars on "Large Scale Experiments". The sixth webinar of this series will be given by Sinan Aral (MIT) on "Interdependence and the Cost of Uncoordinated Responses to COVID-19".

Abstract
Social distancing is the core policy response to COVID-19. But as federal, state and local governments begin opening businesses and relaxing shelter-in-place orders worldwide, we lack quantitative evidence on how policies in one region affect mobility and social distancing in other regions and the consequences of uncoordinated regional policies adopted in the presence of such spillovers. To investigate this concern, we combined daily, county-level data on shelterin-place policies with movement data from over 27 million mobile devices, social network connections among over 220 million of Facebook users, daily temperature and precipitation data from 62,000 weather stations and county-level census data on population demographics to estimate the geographic and social network spillovers created by regional policies across the United States. Our analysis showed the contact patterns of people in a given region are significantly influenced by the policies and behaviors of people in other, sometimes distant, regions. When just one third of a state’s social and geographic peer states adopt shelter in place policies, it creates a reduction in mobility equal to the state’s own policy decisions. These spillovers are mediated by peer travel and distancing behaviors in those states. A simple analytical model calibrated with our empirical estimates demonstrated that the “loss from anarchy” in uncoordinated state policies is increasing in the number of noncooperating states and the size of social and geographic spillovers. These results suggest a substantial cost of uncoordinated government responses to COVID-19 when people, ideas, and media move across borders.

Event Date: Thursday 23rd July 2020

Time: 02:00pm - 03:00pm

Event Contact: Marion Reusch - inet@econ.cam.ac.uk



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Tags:

Networks

Large Scale Experiments

Theme: networks