Regional and sectorial impacts of the Covid-19 crisis: Evidence from electronic payments

The economic impacts of COVID-19 and city lockdown: Early evidence from China

As the first major developing country heavily struck by the COVID-19 pandemic, China adopted the world's most stringent lockdown interventions to contain the virus spread. Using macro- and micro-level data, this paper shows that both the pandemic and lockdown policies have had negative and significant impacts on the economy. Gross regional product (GRP) fell by 9.5 and 0.3 percentage points in cities with and without lockdown interventions, respectively. These impacts represent a dramatic recession from China's average growth of 6.74% before the pandemic. The results indicate that lockdown explains 2.8 percentage points of the GDP loss. We also document significant spill-over effects of the pandemic in adjacent areas but no such effects of lockdown. Reduced labor mobility, land supply, and entrepreneurship are among the most significant mechanisms underpinning the impacts of the pandemic and lockdown. Cities with higher share of secondary industry, higher traffic intensity, lower population density, lower internet access, and lower fiscal capacity suffered more. However, these cities seem to have recovered well from the recession and quickly closed the economic gap in the aftermath of the pandemic and city lockdown. Our findings have broader implications for the global interventions in pandemic containment.

Consumption and income expectations during Covid-19

Using a survey of Italian households administered in November 2021, we study the effect of microeconomic and macroeconomic expectations about the health crisis and income growth on consumption expectations in 2022. The survey elicits individual-level indicators of income and consumption expectations, distinguishing between consumption at home, away from home, online and total. We find that expected household income and expected GDP growth are strongly related to consumption expectations; income risk is positively associated with expected consumption growth for richer households. Finally, our results indicate that health-related variables were not a major drivers of consumption expectations in 2022.

The virus that devastated tourism: The impact of covid-19 on the housing market

We study the causal impact of the negative shock on short-term rentals caused by covid-19 in the tourist-intensive city centre of Lisbon. Our difference-in-differences strategy uses a parish-level treatment relying on the pre-pandemic intensity of short-term rentals, using data between Q3 2018 and Q3 2020. The results suggest that landlords relocated properties into the long-term rental market, in which prices de-crease 4.1%, while listed quantities increase 20% in the treated civil parishes vis-`a-vis comparison ones. We also find evidence of an incremental negative impact on sale prices of 4.8% in treated areas. Our results are robust to the inclusion of Porto.

Human Capital and Labour Market Resilience: A Regional Analysis for Portugal

This paper investigates labour market resilience for seven Portuguese NUTS-2 regions over the period 1995-2018 detailing its relationship with levels of education and highlighting the period following the 2007-08 financial and economic crisis. We define resilience as the ability of regional employment to recover from a recessionary shock over an entire business cycle. Our results point to the existence of labour market resilience to the different business cycles for the different regions in terms of total hours worked. The same conclusion applies to employment of workers with different levels of educational attainment, low, medium and high, defined according to the highest level of education completed by employees. Investigating in more detail the potential differentiated impact of the Portuguese Great Recession (PGR), covering the period after the 2007-08 crisis, our findings suggest however no resilience in terms of total hours worked and employment of workers with low levels of education, corresponding so far to a situation of jobless economic recovery. The conclusions are mixed for employment of workers with medium levels of education, while we found evidence of labour market resilience to the PGR for employment of workers with high levels of education. The strong negative impact of the PGR at the economic level thus seems to have hindered labour market resilience for employees and regions less endowed with human capital.