Earlier this week the New Zealand Economics Papers published a new paper of mine on Covid, where I was able to show that at least in one instance “the best health response was the best economic response”, to paraphrase Grant Robertson. 1/N www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... - ThreadSky

hendysh.bsky.social • 199 days ago

Earlier this week the New Zealand Economics Papers published a new paper of mine on Covid, where I was able to show that at least in one instance “the best health response was the best economic response”, to paraphrase Grant Robertson. 1/N

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00779954.2024.2399617

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kazzah.bsky.social•199 days ago

To quote my accountant boss “sick employees are not productive employees”

specschic.bsky.social•199 days ago

📌

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

This paper was a response to the Productivity Commission work back in 2020 that claimed the 5-day extension of alert level 4 in April was not worth it. We spotted some important omissions back then but only this year did I get around to addressing them myself.

https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/10-08-2020/a-critical-error-in-a-report-on-lockdown-timing-risks-undermining-future-decisions

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

The Prod Comm was clearly pretty grumpy at the time, but I did at least think they had understood it even if they never undertook to correct the omissions. Sadly their work continued to be cited as evidence that New Zealand’s Covid response cost more than it was worth (looking at you Covid Plan B).

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

Then I saw a blog post last year by Dave Heatley, the original author of the work, that showed he had not understood our criticism. I got in touch with him directly but the conversation was unproductive.

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

I decided to redo his work with a simple stochastic model for disease dynamics. I was able to show that the alert level 4 extension outperformed going to level 3 economically, reducing the chances of another lockdown and bringing cases down fast enough that alert level 2 would arrive sooner.

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

It was an interesting exercise. It’s not a cost-benefit analysis of the elimination strategy but it does show that as much as some economists would like to ignore dynamic effects, they are important when considering policies to counter infectious disease.

hendysh.bsky.social•199 days ago

I’ll be passing this paper on to the next stage of the royal commission and would like to have a crack at a cost-benefit analysis for the whole strategy. This is a tougher nut because the counterfactual needs to include the external costs from individual decisions to reduce contact. 7/7

thoughtfulnz.bsky.social•199 days ago

Congratulations on getting it public, and congratulations on successfully navigating that particular pathway.

olimnz.bsky.social•199 days ago

📌

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