Demographic, Jurisdictional, and Spatial Effects on Social Distancing in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic

45 Pages Posted: 26 May 2020 Last revised: 30 Jul 2020

See all articles by Rajesh Narayanan

Rajesh Narayanan

Louisiana State University

James Nordlund

affiliation not provided to SSRN

R. Kelley Pace

Louisiana State University - E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration

Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

Date Written: May 25, 2020

Abstract

Social distancing, a non-pharmaceutical tactic aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19, can arise because individuals voluntarily distance from others to avoid contracting the disease. Alternatively, it can arise because of jurisdictional restrictions imposed by local authorities. We run reduced form models of social distancing as a function of county-level exogenous demographic variables and jurisdictional fixed effects for 49 states to assess the relative contributions of demographic and jurisdictional effects in explaining social distancing behavior. To allow for possible spatial aspects of a contagious disease, we also model the spillovers associated with demographic variables in surrounding counties as well as allow for disturbances that depend upon those in surrounding counties. We run our models weekly and examine the evolution of the estimated coefficients over time since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. These estimated coefficients express the revealed preferences of individuals who were able to and chose to stay at home to avoid the disease.

Stay-at-home behavior measured using cell phone tracking data exhibits considerable cross-sectional variation, increasing over nine-fold from the end of January 2020 to the end of March 2020, and then decreasing by about 50% through mid-June 2020. Our estimation results show that demographic exogenous variables explain substantially more of this variation than predictions from jurisdictional fixed effects. Moreover, the explanations from demographic exogenous variables and jurisdictional fixed effects show an evolving correlation over the sample period, initially partially offsetting, and eventually reinforcing each other. Furthermore, the predicted social distance from demographic exogenous variables shows substantial spatial autoregressive dependence, indicating clustering in social distancing behavior. The increased variance of stay-at-home behavior coupled with the high level of spatial dependence can result in relatively intense hotspots and coldspots of social distance, which has implications for disease spread and mitigation.

Keywords: COVID-19, social distancing, stay at home, spatial dependence

JEL Classification: I12, I18, C21

Suggested Citation

Narayanan, Rajesh and Nordlund, James and Pace, R. Kelley and Ratnadiwakara, Dimuthu, Demographic, Jurisdictional, and Spatial Effects on Social Distancing in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic (May 25, 2020). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3610397 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3610397

Rajesh Narayanan (Contact Author)

Louisiana State University ( email )

Baton Rouge, LA 70803-6308
United States
225-578-6236 (Phone)

James Nordlund

affiliation not provided to SSRN

R. Kelley Pace

Louisiana State University - E.J. Ourso College of Business Administration ( email )

Department of Finance
2164 B Patrick F. Taylor Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803-6308
United States
(225)-578-6256 (Phone)
(225)-578-9065 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.spatial-statistics.com

Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara

Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge ( email )

Baton Rouge, LA 70803
United States

HOME PAGE: http://https://sites.google.com/view/dimuthu-ratnadiwakara

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