January 20th will take place the DEM – REMARC Seminar: “Individual behaviors and the Covid-19 epidemics: Prevention, public policies and inequalities”.
The seminar speakers will be Cécile Aubert (Toulouse School of Economics).
The speaker will discuss several pieces of ongoing work on individual behaviors under the Covid-19 crisis. The focus of the talk will be on theoretical modeling options to integrate individual preventive behaviors into epidemiological models. Because of technical complexity (and relative uncertainty about the epidemiological aspects), models result from trade-offs between complexity and precision. My object here is to better forecast the impact of public policies when individual incentives are taken into account. We can show that countervailing effects can lessen the impact of policies, but that these policies still may save many lives (compared to relying on individual efforts only). I will also show some evidence linking behaviors and inequalities: Individuals in the lower income quintiles suffer more in terms of revenues and savings, but they also change their preventive behaviors in a different way than richer ones. This can be obtained as an equilibrium in models that account for inequalities in health status and budget constraints.
The event will be online. Click here to join the meeting