Substantial transmission of SARS-CoV-2 through casual contact in retail stores: Evidence from matched administrative microdata on card payments and testing.

This paper presents quasiexperimental evidence of Covid-19 transmission through casual contact between customers in retail stores. For a large sample of individuals in Denmark, we match card payment data, indicating exactly where and when each individual made purchases, with Covid-19 test data, indicating when each individual was tested and whether the test was positive. The resulting dataset identifies more than 100,000 instances where an infected individual made a purchase in a store and, in each instance, allows us to track the infection dynamics of other individuals who made purchases in the same store around the same time. We estimate transmissions by comparing the infection rate of exposed customers, who made a purchase within 5 min of an infected individual, and nonexposed customers, who made a purchase in the same store 16 to 30 min before. We find that exposure to an infected individual in a store increases the infection rate by around 0.12 percentage points (P < 0.001) between day 3 and day 7 after exposure. The estimates imply that transmissions in stores contributed around 0.04 to the reproduction number for the average infected individual and significantly more in the period where Omicron was the dominant variant.

Consumer responses to the Covid-19 crisis: evidence from bank account transaction data.

This paper uses transaction-level bank account data from Denmark to study the dynamics of consumer spending during the Covid-19 pandemic. We document that aggregate spending initially dropped by almost 30% but recovered almost fully after the first wave. While spending plummeted in categories severely affected by supply restrictions, it increased in unaffected categories. Individual exposure to health risks and supply restrictions was associated with much larger spending cuts than exposure to income risk and unemployment. The findings suggest that the contraction was mainly caused by temporary health risks and supply restrictions, with a limited role for persistent negative spill-overs. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Social distancing laws cause only small losses of economic activity during the COVID-19 pandemic in Scandinavia.

This paper uses real-time transaction data from a large bank in Scandinavia to estimate the effect of social distancing laws on consumer spending in the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The analysis exploits a natural experiment to disentangle the effects of the virus and the laws aiming to contain it: Denmark and Sweden were similarly exposed to the pandemic but only Denmark imposed significant restrictions on social and economic activities. We estimate that aggregate spending dropped by around 25% (95% CI: 24 to 26%) in Sweden and, as a result of the shutdown, by 4 additional percentage points (95% CI: 3 to 5 percentage points [p.p.]) in Denmark. This suggests that most of the economic contraction is caused by the virus itself and occurs regardless of social distancing laws. The age gradient in the estimates suggests that social distancing reinforces the virus-induced drop in spending for low-health-risk individuals but attenuates it for high-risk individuals by lowering the overall prevalence of the virus in the society.

Irresponsible parties, responsible voters? Legislative gridlock and collective accountability.

Legislative gridlock is a failure of one of the key functions of government: to pass legislation. Can voters counter such political dysfunction? This paper examines whether and how voters hold politicians accountable for gridlock. We focus on the passage of the government budget, the central task of any legislature, and define a legislature to experience budgetary gridlock if it fails to pass the budget on time. We argue, based on evidence from twenty years of budget enactment data, that voters hold state legislators accountable for budget gridlock in US state governments, with gridlocked incumbents losing their seat more often than incumbents passing budgets on time. Based on established theories of party organization in American politics, we develop three competing theoretical hypotheses to guide our understanding of the observed patterns of retrospective voting. We find strong support for collective electoral accountability with voters punishing incumbent members of state legislature majority parties.