The Unintended Consequences of Information Provision: The World Health Organization and Border Restrictions during COVID-19

The days following WHO’s HEIC declaration on January 30, and its labeling of the outbreak a pandemic on arch 11, were associated with the largest number of states imposing border re- trictions for the first time during the outbreak, even accounting for alternative xplanations such as the spread of COVID-19, media coverage of the outbreak, and ther key events between January and March 2020. [...] As we did for the PHEIC declaration and the characterization of the outbreak as a pandemic, we create binary variables for the three days after each of the above dates and for the two days after as a robustness check. [...] Our argument is not that the PHEIC declaration and pandemic announcement are the only events that matter; however, the descriptive data in the figure show that the minority of states imposed before the PHEIC dec- laration and that border restrictions seem to spike around the PHEIC declaration and the pandemic announcement. [...] The RDD allows us to take advantage of the fact that while the timing of the HEIC declaration and pandemic announcement was of course related to the over- ll course of COVID-19, the specific date of each can be treated as quasi-random. [...] While the central contribution of this article is to demonstrate the associ- ation between signals from WHO and increases in the number of states imposing their first border restrictions, there is an additional question of why border restric- tions became universal and seemingly uncoordinated? Of course, a key part of the explanation lies in the novelty of the COVID-19 pandemic and its increasing.