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Governments around the world have adopted unprecedented policies to deal with COVID-19. This paper zooms in on business shutdowns and investigates their effectiveness in reducing mortality. We leverage upon highly granular death registry data for over 4,000 Italian municipalities in a diff-in-diff approach that allows us to credibly mitigate endogeneity concerns. Our results, which are robust to controlling for a host of co-factors, offer strong evidence that business shutdowns are very effective in reducing mortality. We calculate that the death toll from the first wave of COVID-19 in Italy would have been twice as high in their absence. Our findings also highlight that timeliness is key: by acting one week earlier, the government could have reduced the death toll by an additional 25%. Finally, our estimates suggest that shutdowns should be targeted: closing shops, bars and restaurants saves the most lives, while shutting down manufacturing and construction activities has only mild effects.
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?:doi
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10.1101/2020.10.06.20207910
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document_parses/pdf_json/9c5831b3ec5064166e4e8caa9bc118b84dafdd76.json
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?:title
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Business Shutdowns and COVID-19 Mortality
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