A New Look at the Correlation between Disease Control Policies and Economic Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper is an attempt at answering this question by applying quantitative method to objective data: Do governmental disease control policies help or harm the economy over time? My hypothesis is that disease control policies—especially ones that are economically disruptive, for instance stay-at-home orders—will negatively affect short-term economic performance (e.g. more severe drop in real GDP in the short run) but positively affect mid- to long-term economic performance (e.g. faster and long-lasting recovery). Due to the lack of significance for treatment effects for most policies in most periods, I did not observe trends or reversals in the treatment effects that meaningfully support my hypothesis that implementation of economically disruptive disease-control policies would result in negative effects on economic outcome in the short run but positive effects on economic outcome in the mid- to long run.