The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked an ongoing debate on how to balance policy interventions aimed at stopping the spread of the virus against negative economic outcomes. In this article, we use unique Norwegian day-by-day transaction and bid-by-bid auction data in order to examine how market participants reacted to the spreading news of Covid-19 in early March, 2020, the lock-down on March 12, and the re-opening on April 20.
We build our analysis around a hedonic time-dummy model, controlling for housing
attributes, location, and temporal features using dummies for year, calendar month, Easter, weekdays, and week numbers, and construct counter-factuals based on the out-of-sample predictions errors from this model during the period we analyse.
Our ndings suggest that the lock-down depressed prices. The lock-down also led to lower seller condence and more aggressive bidding. The re-opening completely reversed the lock-down eect on prices. For transaction data, the results of the lock-down are particularly striking. While mean daily transaction volume in the week before March 12 was 51 sales, it was 37 after lock-down. Hence, behavioral changes occurring also before the lock-down likely matter a lot. According to our estimates, half of the total fall in prices observed in the week after the look-down occurred before the lock-down.
These conclusions are robust to a number of alternative modelling choices. Placebo regressions demonstrate that it is unlikely that these results have been obtained by chance.
Moreover, our ndings are supported by evidence provided by other high-frequent indicators of social mobility and daily news sentiment. In particular, daily trac and social mobility data show that policy interventions were actually followed by the public, while changes in news sentiment correlates well with the abnormal price movements we observe during this period. These eects are also in line with changes prior to the lock-down. Interestingly, changes in stock market prices do not seem to carry the same type of information, suggesting that households and professional market participants evaluated the situation dierently.
One key nding has important policy implications. In the debate following the lock-down, the predominant view was that policy intervention adversely aected the economy. We nd that even without any change in policy, the economy would have been adversely aected, due to voluntary adjustments in behavior. People responded to the news of Covid-19, not only to the policies against Covid-19.
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BI Norwegian Business School
Centre for Applied Macro - Petroleum economics (CAMP) N-0442 Oslo
www.bi.no/camp
Centre for Applied Macroeconomics and Commodity Prices (CAMP)
will bring together economists working on applied macroeconomic issues, with special emphasis on petroleum economics.
CENTRE FOR APPLIED MACROECONOMICS AND COMMODITY PRICES (CAMP)