Departamento de Administración, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile.
Centro de Investigación Empírica en Negocios, Facultad de Economía y Empresa, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago, Chile.
PLoS One. 2021 Jul 13;16(7):e0254638. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0254638. eCollection 2021.
The Chilean health authorities have implemented a sanitary strategy known as dynamic quarantine or strategic quarantine to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Under this system, lockdowns were established, lifted, or prolonged according to the weekly health authorities' assessment of municipalities' epidemiological situation. The public announcements about the confinement situation of municipalities country-wide are made typically on Tuesdays or Wednesdays before noon, have received extensive media coverage, and generated sharp stock market fluctuations. Municipalities are the smallest administrative division in Chile, with each city broken down typically into several municipalities. We analyze social media behavior in response to the confinement situation of the population at the municipal level. The dynamic quarantine scheme offers a unique opportunity for our analysis, given that municipalities display a high degree of heterogeneity, both in size and in the socioeconomic status of their population. We exploit the variability over time in municipalities' confinement situations, resulting from the dynamic quarantine strategy, and the cross-sectional variability in their socioeconomic characteristics to evaluate the impact of these characteristics on social sentiment. Using event study and panel data methods, we find that proxies for social sentiment based on Twitter queries are negatively related (more pessimistic) to increases in the number of confined people, but with a statistically significant effect concentrated on people from the wealthiest cohorts of the population. For indicators of social sentiment based on Google Trends, we found that search intensity during the periods surrounding government announcements is positively related to increases in the total number of confined people. Still, this effect does not seem to be dependent on the segments of the population affected by the quarantine. Furthermore, we show that the observed heterogeneity in sentiment mirrors heterogeneity in stock market reactions to government announcements. We provide evidence that the observed stock market behavior around quarantine announcements can be explained by the number of people from the wealthiest segments of the population entering or exiting lockdown.
智利卫生当局实施了一项名为动态隔离或战略隔离的卫生战略，以应对 COVID-19 大流行。在这个系统下，封锁的建立、解除或延长是根据每周卫生当局对各市镇流行病学情况的评估而定的。关于全国各市镇禁闭情况的公告通常在周二或周三中午前发布，受到了广泛的媒体报道，并引发了股市的剧烈波动。市镇是智利最小的行政单位，每个城市通常分为几个市镇。我们分析了社交媒体对人口在市级层面上的禁闭情况的反应。由于市镇在规模和人口的社会经济地位方面都具有高度的异质性，动态隔离计划为我们的分析提供了一个独特的机会。我们利用动态隔离策略导致的市镇禁闭情况的时间变化以及它们的社会经济特征的横截面变化来评估这些特征对社会情绪的影响。我们使用事件研究和面板数据方法发现，基于 Twitter 查询的社会情绪代理与被隔离人数的增加呈负相关（更为悲观），但具有统计学意义的影响主要集中在人口中最富裕的群体。对于基于 Google Trends 的社会情绪指标，我们发现政府宣布前后期间的搜索强度与被隔离总人数的增加呈正相关。尽管如此，这种影响似乎并不取决于受隔离影响的人口群体。此外，我们表明，观察到的情绪异质性反映了股票市场对政府公告的反应的异质性。我们提供的证据表明，围绕隔离公告的观察到的股票市场行为可以用最富裕的人口群体中进入或退出封锁的人数来解释。
