Economic impact payment, human mobility and COVID-19 mitigation in the USA

Abstract

This paper studies the effect of the economic impact payment (EIP) on individual contributions to COVID-19 mitigation efforts in the USA, where the mitigation efforts are measured by the reduction of daily human mobility. I empirically estimate the effect of the EIP in April 2020 and use cellphone GPS data of 45 million smartphone devices as a proxy for human mobility across 216,069 Census Block Groups. The results show that when receiving the EIP, households significantly increased “Median Home Dwell Time” by an average of 3–5% (about 26–45 min). The paper highlights this unintended effect of the EIP, namely, that in addition to providing economic assistance, the EIP also helped increase individual contributions to mitigation efforts that slowed COVID-19 virus transmission in early 2020.