Oliver Kirchkamp

Teaching and Research with SARS-CoV-2

Please allow me some remarks regarding teaching and research during a pandemic.

During the last months, our health system was under an enormous strain. The situation keeps changing, but the pandemic is far from over. Academics must take into consideration the consequences their actions have for other people. We should act responsibly. We should not try to find loopholes, pretending one could return to old habits that now have become a danger to the public.
I am grateful to those colleagues (many of them young academics) who, during the past months, have successfully developed safe and digital and inspiring academic events. These colleagues have made and are still making a very important contribution to our academic life. They help us to keep in touch. They help us to carry on with our work in a responsible way. Thank you!
During the last months I have learnt to appreciate digital academic events. I have difficulties understanding colleagues who refuse to engage in safe and responsible digital alternatives. I find it dangerous when these colleages point to others who “do the same”. It does not help if individual members of a society excuse their own behaviour, if they claim that the negative externality generated by them is smaller than the negative externality generated by others.
The behaviour of others never justifies own choices. A society which follows the inefficient example of their neighbours enters a spiral of increasingly inefficient choices. We must make responsible and independent and safe choices. We must help reducing the risk we are imposing on others. All parts of our society make substantial contributions in the fight against the pandemic. The contribution required by academics is very small in comparison. This can be done!

I do thank everybody who cooperates and who supports the efforts of the academic community to teach and to do research in a safe way. I do realise that adjusting routines is sometimes inconvenient. New formats are “not the same” as old formats. New formats are often surprisingly better. I also thank all my colleagues who, with their creativity and with their inspiration, help us dealing with the pandemic.

Digital hospitality among researchers is essential. I am most grateful to the MPI for collective goods for their hospitality and for their inspiring digital activities during the pandemic. I also enjoy several seminar series in my field:

Information

Since I am interested in economic behaviour, I also try to understand, why and how decision makers select information they know is biased, e.g. downplaying the actual risks of SARS-CoV-2. The framework of Kamenica, Gentzkow (AER, 2011) could be useful. Gitmez, Sonin, Wright (2020) apply this framework to behaviour in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.

Digital contact tracing apps can help to fight the pandemic. But how can users be motivated to install such an app. Cheng, Fang, Goette (2021) use a large-scale experiment on social media to understand how users can be encouraged (Cheng, Fang, Goette. 2021. Not on my smartphone! Does information about local COVID-19 incidence increase the use of digital contact tracing apps? Mimeo).

Externalities

Non-pharmaceutical measures against the pandemic often restrict social contacts. Social contacts come with individual costs and benefits. They also come with externalities, i.e. with cost and benefits for others. Philipson and Posner (1993) present a framework in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Toxvaerd (2021) extends this framework to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and compares the effects of two types of externalities: infection externalities and socioeconomic externalities.

Brotherhood, Jerbashian (2020) study the role of firms. They ask how much firms can gain by fighting infections to protect their workforce.

Quaas , Meya, Schenk, Bos, Drupp, Requate focus on the dynamics of optimal restrictions. Should one restrict contacts in a strict way for a short time, or should one rather restrict contacts in a milder way over a long time horizon?

Lu and Wang (2021) study in which way a pandemic has the potential to change society and to support democratization. Mechanisms considered are civil participation, political dissent, and what the authors call a risk of government by the people consciousness. (Ming Lu and Danli Wang. 2021. Epidemics and Democratization: Historical Evidence from the Establishment of County Councils in China (1900-1949). Mimeo.)

Here are further contributions from researchers in my field which relate to the pandemic and which I find interesting:

Here are some links regarding the spread of the infection. This is not strictly economics, but since economic arguments on how to deal with the pandemic are often based on forecasts, a good model of the spread of the infection is key: