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People often change behavior in response to a risky event. However, such behavior response may be largely determined by their attitude (e.g., risk aversion) and what they believe, i.e., risk perception. In this study, we use U.S. residents' location data from a large sample of mobile phone users during the pandemic from 2020 to 2021, and the political standing of the local county measured by the partisanship in the recent Presidential election in 2016 and 2020, to study how people's political standing may affect their response to risky event. We argue that such a difference is due to varying risk perception due to drastic contrast of view regarding the pandemic. We find that compared to residents in the "blue" counties, those in "red" counties tends to conduct more trips to various POIs including those deemed as riskier in getting the Covid virus; have a lower vaccination rate; experienced lower number of Covid cases, but higher number of Covid deaths. We also find that vaccination is effective in reducing number of covid cases and deaths, and the effect may get stronger over time. Our results suggest that risk misperception can lead to big social costs, and the impact of bi-polar partisanship on information acquisition should be taken into account when evaluating the effectiveness of public policies, or other related political economy studies.
报告人
Guanming Shi is a professor, the Renk Agribusiness Chair, and the Department Chair of Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. She is a core faculty member of the Initiative for Studies in Transformational Entrepreneurship Cluster, UW Madison, School of Business, co-founder and co-director of Pan Asia Pacific Sustainability Initiative (PAPSI), and serves in multiple college and campus level academic administrative committees.
She studies the economics of industrial organization in the U.S and China. Much of her research focuses on firms’ strategic behavior under imperfect competition including pricing, product offering, collusion, and intellectual property protection, with applications to biotechnology and innovation in the genetically modified seed industry. She is also interested in the adoption, profitability and impact of new technology, risk perception and management, and emerging issues related to environment and development in developing economy. Her work has been published in top field economics journals such as American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Review of Industrial Organization, European Review of Agricultural Economics, Environment and Development Economics, as well as in high impact interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Biotechnology and Science of the Total Environment. She received her Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California at Berkeley.
讲座组织：北京大学中国农业政策研究中心
编 辑 | 杜轩昊
近 期 热 点
