Experts and Epidemics

Arbeitspapier

Do experts adjust their policy recommendations when the facts change? We conduct a large-scale randomized experiment among 1,224 economic experts across 109 countries that includes two treatments. The first treatment is the geographic and temporal variation in the initial spread of Covid-19 during March 2020, which we use as a natural experiment. The second is a randomly assigned information treatment that informs experts about the past macroeconomic performance of their country. We find that greater exposure to Covid-19 decreases the probability to recommend contractionary fiscal policies. A better macroeconomic performance increases the probability to implement contractionary policies and reduces the exposure effect to Covid-19. While our results show that experts adjust their policy recommendations to changing environments, sentiment analyses of open-ended questions asked after the treatment suggest that these adjustments are caused by Bayesian information updating and not by a change in preferences.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: CESifo Working Paper ; No. 8556

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Role of Economics; Role of Economists; Market for Economists ; Fiscal Policy ; National Budget, Deficit, and Debt: General ; National Debt; Debt Management; Sovereign Debt
• Thema: epidemics ; Covid-19 ; health ; experts ; fiscal preferences ; randomized experiment

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Gründler, Klaus ; Potrafke, Niklas
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute (CESifo)
• (wo): Munich
• (wann): 2020

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/226258
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ