JUE Insight: Learning Epidemiology by Doing: The Empirical Implications of a Spatial SIR Model with Behavioral Responses

Journal of Urban Economics 127, January 2022 (with Alberto Bisin)
  • Abstract
    We simulate a spatial behavioral model of the diffusion of an infection to understand the role of geographical characteristics: city size, density, distribution of initial outbreaks, movement of agents. We show that several invariance properties of the SIR model with respect to these variables do not hold when agents are placed in a two dimensional space. Local herd immunity plays a fundamental role in changing the dynamics of the infection. We also show that geographical factors affect how behavioral responses affect the epidemics. We derive relevant implications for the estimation of epidemiological models with panel data from several geographical units.
  • External appendix
  • Replication package
  • Twitter thread
  • CitationBibTeX
    Bisin, Alberto, and Andrea Moro. "JUE Insight: Learning Epidemiology by Doing: The Empirical Implications of a Spatial SIR Model with Behavioral Responses," Journal of Urban Economics 127, January 2022 
    @article{bisin-moro-spatialsir-2022,
    title = "JUE Insight: Learning Epidemiology by Doing: The Empirical Implications of a Spatial SIR Model with Behavioral Responses",
    author = "Bisin, Alberto and Andrea Moro",
    year = "2022",
    month = " January ",
    journal = "Journal of Urban Economics",
    volume = "127",
    url = "http://andreamoro.net/assets/papers/spatialSIR.pdf"
}