Graduation Year

2024

Date of Submission

12-2023

Document Type

Campus Only Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Economics

Reader 1

Professor Serkan Ozbeklik

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Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

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2023 Jacob A Allmon

Abstract

This paper explores the heterogeneous impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on U.S. states, focusing on the identification of key factors that explain the variation in three state-level pandemic outcomes in 2020: real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, job shortfall, and COVID-19 mortality rate. I develop an empirical framework that corroborates certain takeaways from existing literature, suggesting that many of the findings from cross-country studies apply to the heterogeneity of pandemic outcomes observed among U.S. states. I identify key state-level characteristics, namely GDP per capita, sectoral composition of labor, and stringency of lockdown policy, as strong predictors of pandemic outcomes in 2020. Altogether, this paper contributes to an ongoing discussion of the economic and public health tradeoffs that resulted from different responses to the COVID-19 pandemic among U.S. states in 2020.

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