Paolo Pinotti Discussion of: Mental Health
讨论Adams-Prassl等人关于美国封锁期间心理健康的调查数据，利用月度大样本数据识别居家令对心理健康的显著影响，平均效应略低于十分之一标准差。
In 2020, for the first time in history, entire countries underwent prolonged periods of stay-at-home orders, school closures and curfews. These policies contributed stress and disruption on top of the anxiety caused by the pandemic. Although most of us have experimented with these effects during the last two years, it remains difficult to precisely quantify them in the absence of systematic data on mental health. The first important merit of Adams-Prassl, Boneva, Golin and Rauh is to collect such data for the United States. The survey they conducted in the midst of lockdowns (March–May 2020) collected detailed information for a large sample of individuals at a monthly frequency. The second important contribution of the paper is to leverage on these unique data to identify a significant impact of stay-at-home orders on mental health. The average effect across all individuals – just less than a tenth of a standard deviation of...