@techreport{f46848e2b0b64d9ba3f674bde5fc9634,
title = "The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay-At-Home Policies",
abstract = "This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and representative sample of the Swedish population. The results suggest that the welfare cost of a one-month stay-at-home policy, restricting non-working hours away from home, amounts to 9.1 percent of Sweden's monthly GDP. The cost can be interpreted as 29,600 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), which roughly corresponds to between 3,700 and 8,000 COVID-19 fatalities. Moreover, we find that stricter and longer lockdowns are disproportionately more costly than more lenient ones. This result indicates that strict stay-at-home policies are likely to be cost-effective only if they slow the spread of the disease much more than more lenient ones. ",
keywords = "Stay-at-home orders, welfare effects, choice experiment, D62, I18",
author = "Ola Andersson and Pol Campos-Mercade and Fredrik Carlsson and Florian Schneider and Erik Wengstr{\"o}m",
year = "2020",
month = may,
day = "25",
language = "English",
series = "Working Papers",
publisher = "Lund University, Department of Economics",
number = "2020:9",
type = "WorkingPaper",
institution = "Lund University, Department of Economics",
}