The Review of Economics and Statistics Vol. 107 No. 3 2025
Evaluating Policies Early in a Pandemic: Bounding Policy Effects with Nonrandomly Missing Data
Abstract
During the early part of the COVID-19 pandemic, national and local governments introduced a number of policies to combat the spread of COVID-19. In this paper, we propose a new approach to bound the effects of such early-pandemic policies on COVID-19 cases and other outcomes while dealing with complications arising from (i) limited availability of COVID-19 tests, (ii) differential availability of COVID-19 tests across locations, and (iii) eligibility requirements for individuals to be tested. We use our approach study the effects of Tennessee’s expansion of COVID-19 testing early in the pandemic and find that the policy decreased COVID-19 cases.
- DOI
- 10.1162/rest_a_01306
- Volume
- 107
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 803-819
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref