Understanding Cross-Country Heterogeneity in Health and Economic Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Revealed-Preference Approach

Author : Daisuke Fujii, Sohta Kawawaki, Yuta Maeda, Masataka Mori, Taisuke Nakata

Abstract

There is a large heterogeneity in health and macroeconomic outcomes across countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. We present a novel framework to understand the source of this heterogeneity, combining an estimated macro-epidemiological model and the idea of revealed preference. Our framework allows us to decompose the difference in health and macroeconomic outcomes across countries into two components: preference and constraint. We find that there is a large heterogeneity in both components across countries and that some countries such as Japan or Australia are willing to accept a large output loss to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths.