COVID ECONOMICS - VETTED AND REAL-TIME PAPERS ISSUE 40 30 JULY 2020

The factors we study include income, socio-demographic vari- ables, pre-pandemic health characteristics, job and income losses, work arrangements (e.g., the ability to tele-work) and housing, along with beliefs and perceptions about the pandemic (e.g., whether individuals perceive social-distancing to be an effective measure and the consequences of infection). [...] Using these measures, we show that on average individuals in the fifth income quintile (quintile mean $233,895) are between 13 and 19 percentage points (16–54%) more likely to engage in protective behaviors compared to individuals in the first income quintile (quintile mean $13,775).1 For each of these behaviors, the difference between the first and fifth income quintile is statistically significa. [...] In the current context, the tension between private behavior and public health is exacerbated by the fact that many of the people asked to incur the most brutal economic and social costs of protective behaviors face relatively low personal risk of serious health problems. [...] The number in the table reflects the average of the remaining values. [...] Second, the survey asks respondents to report how frequently they engaged in 15 different activities before the pandemic, at the start of the pandemic, and a few weeks after the pandemic began.