Thiemo Fetzer Discussion of: COVID and Income Inequality
讨论了一项利用西班牙银行微观数据的研究，该研究通过描述性分析表明，政府转移支付的大幅扩张基本抵消了新冠疫情导致的收入损失，从而限制了收入不平等的加剧。
The COVID-19 pandemic led to an unprecedented economic policy response across much of the world. A broad range of conventional and unconventional economic policy instruments were deployed and the research community will spend the next years parsing through the wealth of research questions that can be studied through the data generated by these policy interventions. The present paper is a nice illustration of the type of research that can be carried out in a real-time fashion. It is the first and foremost a cleanly executed descriptive analysis leveraging confidential micro data from one of Spain’s largest banks. Motivated by concerns about COVID-19’s impact on inequality, it suggests that the significant expansion of government transfers mostly offset income losses that arose due to the public health crisis. The authors carefully document how the fiscal response in Spain notably limited the first-order negative impacts on income and, to a significant extent, on...