2021, Emilia Simeonova, "Stay-at-Home Mandates Having Geographic Spillovers"

In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many state and local governments enacted stay-at-home policies that limited residents’ mobility and shut down many businesses. The impact of these policies was not limited to the jurisdictions that enacted them. People living nearby, particularly in areas that shared a media market with the stay-at-home jurisdiction, also scaled back their activity, even though they were not required to do so. In a new study (29088), NBER researchers Alessandro Rebucci and Emilia Simeonova of Johns Hopkins University and their colleagues Vadim Elenev and Luis Quintero document the effect of stay-at-home orders on mobility and economic activity in the jurisdictions that imposed the orders and in adjacent counties that did not. Simeonova summarizes their findings in the video above, and explores the conditions associated with the largest spill-over effects.  An archive of NBER research spotlights on pandemic-related topics may be found here.