Covid-19 briefing: working from home and worker productivity

John Lewis, Andrea Šiško and Misa Tanaka

The Covid pandemic has led to a large enforced shift towards working from home (WFH) as a result of ‘stay-at-home’ policies in many countries. This led to a resurgence in interest in, and new reignited discussion about, the consequences of greater WFH. In this briefing we review the literature on the impact of WFH on productivity. Across a very diverse literature the key lessons are: impacts depend on the nature of tasks, the share of WFH matters, and there is big difference between enforced versus voluntary WFH. And the caveats are important too: cost savings at the firm level don’t automatically translate into economy-wide productivity gains and evidence on long-run effects remains very scarce.

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Covid-19 briefing: pandemics, natural disasters and banks’ balance sheets

Neeltje van Horen

The Covid-19 (Covid) pandemic is a major shock to the economy but unlike traditional crises or credit crunches, its origin is exogenous to the financial sector. The economy’s ability to recover from the impact of the pandemic will however depend in part on the availability of credit. This raises the question how banks absorb a large shock which originates from outside the financial sector. To answer this question this post reviews the literature on how previous pandemics and natural disasters in the developed world affected banks’ balance sheets. One key message stands out: banks that are more rooted in their market are much more likely to continue lending when faced with the economic fallout from such shock.

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Capital flights during Covid-19

Fernando Eguren-Martin, Cian O’Neill, Andrej Sokol and Lukas von dem Berge

While planes were grounded, capital flew out of emerging market economies in response to the acceleration in the spread of the virus in the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. Was this capital flight predictable once you account for the sudden deterioration in the global financial environment? In this post we present a model that helps to think about how financial conditions and international capital flows are linked. We then apply this methodology to events observed between March and May 2020, and find that the model predicted a large increase in the likelihood of capital flight. However, the scale of outflows was abnormally large even once the sharp tightening in financial conditions is accounted for.

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Covid-19 briefing: extensions to the SIR model

John Lewis

The SIR model, first developed by Kermack and McKendrick (1927), remains the canonical epidemiological model. It a natural choice for economists seeking to model the interplay between economic and epidemiological dynamics. This briefing surveys some of the many adaptations to the basic SIR setup which have emerged in the epi-macro literature over the past six months. These have all been used to analyse issues such as lockdown policies, super-spreaders, herd immunity, hospital capacity and ‘test- and-trace’.

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When bigger isn’t better: UK firms’ equity price performance during the Covid-19 pandemic

Tommaso Aquilante, David Bholat, Andreas Joseph, Riccardo M Masolo, Tim Munday and David van Dijcke

Background

Covid-19 (Covid) has had heterogeneous effects on different groups of people. For example, it’s had larger negative impacts on contact-intense occupations (Leibovici, Santacreu and Famiglietti (2020)), low wage earners (Joyce and Xu (2020)) and low-income households (Surico, Känzig and Hacioglu (2020) and Chetty et al (2020)). In this blog, we show that UK listed firms have been heterogeneously impacted too (compare Hassan et al (2020); Griffith, Levell and Stroud (2020)). Surprisingly, small firms’ stock prices have been more resilient on average. Or, to put it differently, being bigger hasn’t been better for firms during the pandemic. However, being big with a modern tilt towards intangibles turned out to be beneficial too.

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Covid-19 briefing: monetary policy strategy post-Covid

Richard Harrison, Kate Reinold and Rana Sajedi

The Covid shock has created substantial and unprecedented challenges for monetary policymakers. This post summarises the key literature on the immediate monetary policy response to the shock, including both tools and short to medium-term strategy issues (but leaving aside the longer-term question of fiscal-monetary interactions).

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Covid-19 briefing: Covid-19 crisis, climate change and green recovery

Misa Tanaka

The Coronavirus pandemic and measures to contain contagion had far reaching consequences on economic activities, which also led to a sharp fall in CO₂ emissions. This has sparked new debate about how the recovery from the crisis could be made compatible with the Paris climate goals. In this post, I survey the emerging literature on the link between the economic recovery from the aftermath of the pandemic and climate change.

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Hubble? Bubble? Valuation trouble?

Can Gao, Ian Martin, Arjun Mahalingam and Nicholas Vause

Since Covid-19-related crashes in March, major stock indices around the world have bounced back. This is despite little or no recovery in corporate earnings expectations. As a result, forward-looking price-to-earnings ratios have increased, rising above long-run average values in most large advanced economies and approaching record highs in the United States. Commenting on such valuations, some market participants have suggested there is ‘a great deal of optimism priced into the market’ and that stock prices ‘cannot defy economic gravity indefinitely’. This post takes a closer look at stock valuations, focusing on the UK, and drawing both on a textbook model and new research from academia.

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Covid-19 briefing: tracking economic variables in real time

Joel Mundy

During the current pandemic, economic variables have moved quickly and by large magnitudes. Given the publication lags for official data this has led to a greater emphasis on higher-frequency and/or more timely measures to track the economic impact of the pandemic and gauge the state of the economy in real time. This post looks at the emerging body of work in this area, with a particular focus on real-time measures of consumer expenditure and activity in the labour market.

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Covid-19 briefing: heterogeneous impacts of the pandemic

Andrea Šiško

The COVID-19 pandemic has rapidly spawned a literature analysing its impact on macroeconomic aggregates. But there’s also been work that seeks to look at heterogeneity of impacts across industries, households and individuals. This post summarises this literature which seeks to better understand the heterogeneous effects of the pandemic and associated policy responses on income, hours worked and employment status.

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