ALL-COVID, ALL THE TIME. WATSON,

This is the most-studied-in-real-time pandemic ever. That's not saying much, actually. Anything that happens these days is the most-studied-in-real-time ever. We're the richest our species has ever been. Several billion of us no longer have to spend 24/7 foraging for food. We're free to devote ourselves to much more interesting things. That freedom, not all our modern baubles and trinkets, is the main benefit of affluence.

We are so rich millions of us have become professional studiers. I subscribe to only a small subset of all the notification services that are available just in economics. But here's a COVID sampling from this week's in-box:

From the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research, a clearinghouse for top-quality research, a paper on “The gendered impact of the COVID-19 recession on the U.S. labour market.” The high-contact jobs that were disproportionately hit by COVID are just 15 per cent of all jobs. But 73 per cent of them are held by women. Employment in these jobs fell 40 per cent by April 2020 and by year's end was still down 10 per cent — which actually seems low to me, given widespread lockdowns. Of course, as a privileged white male and a person of age, to boot, what I mainly get out of this paper is that the COVID recession is the exception that proves the rule: normal recessions mainly hit men. Will future recession palliatives take that not-very-woke fact into account?

From the Penn Institute for Economic Research at the University of Pennsylvania comes a paper on “The long-term distributional and welfare effects of COVID-19 school closures,” in which four economists model the effects of a sixmonth school closure and a drop in employment income, all for the U.S. It's not a survey of what people are actually doing. It's a model that tries to estimate what would happen if people responded in economically sensible ways, for instance, by devoting time to home-schooling and spending more money on their kids, to the extent the recession lets them. It shows there's a big hit from the school closures, not so much from the recession. Highschool and college graduation rates fall a couple of per cent and so do the lifetime income and consumption of the affected cohorts — with the effects being biggest, as you'd expect, on kids “with parents with low education attainment and low assets.” There's a big debate now in the U.S. about when to reopen schools, with the Biden administration taking a not very hard line — presumably because of its close ties to teachers' unions, which are not eager to go back. The coastal elites running the administration should pay attention to this research from Penn.

Also from the Penn Institute, by four different economists, is a paper on “Corona Politics: The cost of mismanaging pandemics,” which will interest political operatives in premiers' and prime minister's offices across the country. Looking at COVID, economic and polling data from 35 countries, including Canada, the researchers find that in the first month of the pandemic all political leaders experienced a bump in their approval ratings, which they attribute to a “rally round the flag” effect. After that, however, how leaders did in managing the pandemic, as measured mainly by case counts, affected their numbers — with the interesting proviso that higher case counts reduced leaders' popularity mainly in countries that adopted less stringent lockdowns. Politically speaking, therefore, the less risk-averse strategy may be to go for stricter controls — which may explain why risk-averse politicians in risk-averse Canada have generally done that. It's also interesting that case numbers, which are notoriously dependent on how much testing is done, have greater explanatory power than actual COVID deaths.

Regarding the strictness or not of controls, the Bank of Canada has a new staff analytical note out: “The Bank of Canada COVID-19 stringency index: measuring policy response across provinces,” that Canadianizes the approach taken by an Oxford group in judging policy stringency across more than 180 countries. Aggregating nine separate measures of stringency, the bank's researchers find, unsurprisingly, that measures were strictest last spring, as the pandemic hit, relaxed during the summer and became stricter again during the second wave. What's more surprising is that, despite national-media narratives castigating some provinces' supposed recklessness, the latest numbers show stringency relatively tightly bunched between 56 and 73 on a scale of 100. Ontario is highest but the Atlantic provinces are lowest, at 56 — which seems strange: surely shutting yourself off from the outside world for a year is extremely stringent, even if it does allow you to be more relaxed internally.

Finally, the bank also has a paper out on the use of cash in the COVID recession: “Cash and COVID-19: The effects of lifting containment measures on cash demand and use.” (Remember cash? I went to an ATM the other day and had to think twice about what my passcode was.)

Unfortunately, I've run out of room to tell you about this study.

Rivers of real-time research on a continuing crisis is great. But it does make you pity our leaders. In earlier plagues, kings and queens had to contend with the moaning of priests and shamans. Now they've got legions of researchers hounding them.

RIVERS OF REAL-TIME RESEARCH ON A CONTINUING CRISIS IS GREAT. BUT IT DOES MAKE YOU PITY OUR LEADERS.