Upcoming Events
Colloquium on Computational Social Science/Computational Data Sciences
Dec 4, 2020, 3:00 - 4:30 PM
Do we need another lockdown? A cost-benefit analysis.
Anna Scherbina
Associate Professor of Finance, Brandeis International Business School
Absent another lockdown, the Covid-19 pandemic will cost up to $8 trillion before a vaccine becomes widely available. Using a cost-benefit analysis that evaluates the savings from the reduced number of new Covid cases against the cost of a lockdown to the economic activity, I find that a new nation-wide lockdown will have a large net benefit. Depending on the assumptions, the lockdown should optimally last between nine and 11 weeks, and it will achieve total savings between $2 trillion and $7 trillion. The estimations further show that the frequently proposed on-off lockdown policy is less economically efficient than a continuous lockdown implemented as soon as possible.
Anna Scherbina is an associate professor of finance at Brandeis University. Prior to joining Brandeis, she was an associate professor at UC Davis and an assistant professor at the Harvard Business School. From 2017 to 2019 she worked as a senior economist at the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers. She also worked at the Federal Reserve Board and the International Monetary Fund.
Dr. Scherbina specializes in behavioral finance and asset pricing. Her research answers questions such as why seemingly sophisticated mutual fund managers may hold on to stocks with poor prospects; how investor disagreement about a firm affects its future stock returns; what is the effect of malicious cyber activity on the U.S. economy; how information disseminates in the stock market; and what happened to the real estate sector during the Great Depression.
Dr. Scherbina received a Ph.D. in finance from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.
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