Time：10:00-11:30am, Dec. 25, 2020

Venue: Room 107, School of Economics

Speaker：YOU Wei, Assistant Professor, Institute of New Structural Economics

How does a pandemic affect economic activity at the local level? In this paper, we estimate the local effect of the 2003 SARS pandemic on firm-level exports. Compared to Covid-19, the 2003 SARS is less infectious but much more fatal. Therefore, the discovery of a SARS patient presumably could have caused a panic, thus disrupting the local economic activity. We combine the geocoded SARS patient data with the transaction-level custom data from 2001 to 2006, and estimate whether the discovery of a SARS patient reduced the export values of the firms in the local neighborhoods. We find that, compared to firms located between 5 and 10 km of the SARS hospital, the firms located with 5 km of the SARS hospital experienced a 10% relative decrease in export value after the hospital received a SARS patient.