At the end of March, CEPR launched a new online (lightly) peer-reviewed publication,  Covid Economics, Vetted and Real-Time Papers, to disseminate emerging scholarly work on the Covid-19 epidemic. Very quickly after the onset of the epidemic, a large number of policy papers were produced by economic scholars, many of which have appeared on VoxEU. This was enormously helpful in improving our understanding of policy options, but the next step requires more
formal investigations, based on explicit theory and/or empirical evidence. Covid Economics aims to collate some of the best economic research on Covid-19 so that it might inform the academic and policy debate in an acute crisis when results have to circulate fast. It has been extremely well received by both the academic and policy-making communities.

Monica Casta Dias, Christine Farquharson, Rachel Griffith, Robert Joyce and Peter Levell, 'Getting People Back Into Work'.

Governments are starting to ease restrictions to economic activity. The risks of easing these measures too soon, or in misguided ways, are obvious, not only for public health but also for the economy. A world with no lockdown and a pandemic spreading rapidly through the population does not make for a healthy economy; nor, in all likelihood, does a world in which containment measures have to be repeatedly re-instated after being eased prematurely or in sub-optimal
ways. We discuss some key economic issues that the UK government needs to face when thinking about how best to get people back into work: we assemble some basic empirical evidence, identify some challenges that policy-makers will need to confront, and discuss some policy considerations.

Read the full paper here.