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Working Paper
The Causal Effects of Lockdown Policies on Health and Macroeconomic Outcomes
We assess the causal impact of epidemic-induced lockdowns on health and macroeconomic outcomes and measure the trade-off between containing the spread of an epidemic and economic activity. To do so, we estimate an epidemiological model with time-varying parameters and use its output as information for estimating SVARs and LPs that quantify the causal effects of nonpharmaceutical policy interventions. We apply our approach to Belgian data for the COVID-19 epidemic during 2020. We find that additional government mandated mobility curtailments would have reduced deaths at a very small cost in ...
Working Paper
Bayesian Estimation of Epidemiological Models: Methods, Causality, and Policy Trade-Offs
We present a general framework for Bayesian estimation and causality assessment in epidemiological models. The key to our approach is the use of sequential Monte Carlo methods to evaluate the likelihood of a generic epidemiological model. Once we have the likelihood, we specify priors and rely on a Markov chain Monte Carlo to sample from the posterior distribution. We show how to use the posterior simulation outputs as inputs for exercises in causality assessment. We apply our approach to Belgian data for the COVID-19 epidemic during 2020. Our estimated time-varying-parameters SIRD model ...
Report
Paradoxes and Problems in the Causal Interpretation of Equilibrium Economics
Equilibrium assumptions posit relations between different people's beliefs and behavior without describing a process that causes these relations to hold. I show that because equilibrium models do not describe a causal process whereby one endogenous variable affects another, attempts to decompose the effects of shocks into “direct” and “indirect” effects can suggest misleading predictions about how these models work. Equilibrium assumptions also imply absurd paradoxes: history can determine future behavior without affecting any intervening state variables today; individuals can learn ...