Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98105, United States.
Econ Hum Biol. 2021 Jan;40:100936. doi: 10.1016/j.ehb.2020.100936. Epub 2020 Nov 4.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, both the U.S. and Europe have issued movement restrictions with the exception of visits to essential services, including groceries and pharmacies. Using Google's data on community mobility, I employ an event-study design to compare the effects of movement restrictions on physical mobility in the U.S. and Europe. I find that compared to Europe, the U.S. has higher levels of mobility related to visits to groceries and pharmacies and lower levels of the residential presence relative to baseline values, and the differences are not only statistically significant but also of large magnitudes. Such differences in post-restriction mobility are still significant between Europe and the U.S.' early epicenters of COVID-19. The main results of this paper are robust to changes in samples and specifications. These findings suggest that movement restrictions appear to be less effective in the U.S., which have useful implications for health policy evaluation, pandemic forecasting, and economic recovery.
在 COVID-19 大流行期间，美国和欧洲都发布了除了基本服务（包括杂货店和药店）以外的出行限制。我使用谷歌的社区流动性数据，采用事件研究设计来比较出行限制对美国和欧洲身体流动性的影响。我发现，与欧洲相比，美国与杂货店和药店有关的出行流动性水平更高，而与基准值相比，居住场所的流动性水平更低，且这些差异不仅在统计学上显著，而且幅度也很大。在 COVID-19 的早期中心，欧洲和美国之间的这种限制出行后的流动性差异仍然显著。本文的主要结果在样本和规格变化下仍然稳健。这些发现表明，出行限制在美国似乎效果较差，这对卫生政策评估、大流行预测和经济复苏具有重要意义。
