论文标题
估计大规模流动性网络的COVID-19政策的地理溢出效应
Estimating Geographic Spillover Effects of COVID-19 Policies From Large-Scale Mobility Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
美国的许多政策在当地确定,例如在县级。当地政策制度提供了区域之间的灵活性,但在存在地理溢出的情况下可能会变得不太效率,在这种情况下,人口通过前往附近限制较小的地区来规避当地限制。由于决策的内源性,几乎没有机会可靠地估计因果溢出效应或评估其对当地政策的影响。在这项工作中,我们确定了一种新颖的环境,并开发了一种合适的方法,使我们能够对当地政策的溢出效应进行无关的估计。为了关注加利福尼亚州的蓝图,我们利用公共Covid-19的严重性统计数据确定县级流动性限制是如何确定的,从而使回归不连续性设计框架可以估算县之间的溢出。我们使用具有数十亿个时间戳边缘的移动性网络估算这些效果,并发现了巨大的溢出运动,在零售,饮食场所和健身房中具有更大的影响。与地方和全球政策制度相比,我们的溢出估计表明,县级限制仅与降低流动性时的全州限制一样有效。但是,宏观限制的中间策略 - 我们通过在溢出估计的加权图上解决最小的K切割问题来优化县分区 - 可以恢复超过90%的全州移动性降低,同时保持县之间的实质性灵活性。
Many policies in the US are determined locally, e.g., at the county-level. Local policy regimes provide flexibility between regions, but may become less effective in the presence of geographic spillovers, where populations circumvent local restrictions by traveling to less restricted regions nearby. Due to the endogenous nature of policymaking, there have been few opportunities to reliably estimate causal spillover effects or evaluate their impact on local policies. In this work, we identify a novel setting and develop a suitable methodology that allow us to make unconfounded estimates of spillover effects of local policies. Focusing on California's Blueprint for a Safer Economy, we leverage how county-level mobility restrictions were deterministically set by public COVID-19 severity statistics, enabling a regression discontinuity design framework to estimate spillovers between counties. We estimate these effects using a mobility network with billions of timestamped edges and find significant spillover movement, with larger effects in retail, eating places, and gyms. Contrasting local and global policy regimes, our spillover estimates suggest that county-level restrictions are only 54% as effective as statewide restrictions at reducing mobility. However, an intermediate strategy of macro-county restrictions -- where we optimize county partitions by solving a minimum k-cut problem on a graph weighted by our spillover estimates -- can recover over 90% of statewide mobility reductions, while maintaining substantial flexibility between counties.