Topic: Policy Effectiveness on the Global Covid-19 Pandemic and Unemployment Outcomes: A Large Mixed Frequency Spatial Approach  

Speaker: Associate Professor Xiaoyi Han

Time: 15:00, June 29, 2022

Location: Online, Tencent meeting number: 911-634-271

Abstract:We propose a mixed frequency spatial VAR (MF-SVAR) modeling framework to measure the effectiveness of policies conditional on the spillover and diffusion effects of the global pandemic and unemployment. We study the effects of two aspects of policy effectiveness, namely policy start date and policy timeliness, from a spatio-temporal perspective. The spatial panel data contain weekly new case growth rates and monthly unemployment rate changes for 68 countries across six continents at mixed frequencies from January 2020 to August 2021. We find that government policies have a significant impact on the growth of new cases, but only a marginal effect on the change in unemployment rates. A policy’s start date is critical for its effectiveness. In terms of both immediate impact on the near term and total impact over the following four weeks, starting a policy in the 4th week of a month is most effective at reducing the growth of new cases. At the same time, starting in the 2nd or 3rd week is counterproductive for a one-time policy start date. In addition, our estimates suggest that the spillover and diffusion effects are much stronger than a country’s temporal effect during a global pandemic, both for new case growth and changes in unemployment. We also find that new case growth influences changes in unemployment, but not vice versa. Counterfactual experiments provide further evidence of policy effectiveness in various scenarios and also reveal the main risk-vulnerable and risk-spillover countries.

Introduction of the speaker:Xiaoyi Han, received his Ph.D in economics from Ohio State University in 2014. He is an associate professor and doctoral supervisor of Wang Yanan Institute for Studies in Economics and School of Economics at Xiamen University currently. He mainly researches on econometrics, applied econometrics, regional economics and labor economics. Several papers have been published in PNAS, Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Econometric Theory and Regional Science and Urban Economics. He has served as a reviewer for more than 20 authoritative academic journals in the fields of economics, statistics, computing science, regional science and environmental science for a long time. He is principal investigator of one General Program and one Youth Program of National Natural Science Foundation of China.