0000000000124665
AUTHOR
Klaus Waelde
How to remove the testing bias in CoV-2 statistics
BACKGROUNDPublic health measures and private behaviour are based on reported numbers of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Some argue that testing influences the confirmed number of infections.OBJECTIVES/METHODSDo time series on reported infections and the number of tests allow one to draw conclusions about actual infection numbers? A SIR model is presented where the true numbers of susceptible, infectious and removed individuals are unobserved. Testing is also modelled.RESULTSOfficial confirmed infection numbers are likely to be biased and cannot be compared over time. The bias occurs because of different reasons for testing (e.g. by symptoms, representative or testing travellers). The paper illustrat…
Testing & Opening in Augustusburg A Success Story?
AbstractThe city of Augustusburg allowed for opening of, inter alia, restaurants and hotels joint with large-scale testing. We evaluate this testing & opening (T&O) experiment by comparing the evolution of case rates in Augustusburg with the evolution in other communities of Saxony. We have access to small-scale SARS-CoV-2 infection data at the community level (” Gemeinde”) instead of the county level (” Landkreis”) usually used for disease surveillance. Despite data challenges, we conclude that T&O did not lead to any increase in case rates in Augustusburg compared to its control county. When we measure the effect of T&O on cumulative cases, we find a small increase in Augu…
Unemployment and Vacancy Dynamics with Imperfect Financial Markets
This paper proposes a simple general equilibrium model with labour market frictions and an imperfect financial market. The aim of the paper is to analyse the transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancies when financial constraints are in place. We model the financial sector as a monopolistically competitive banking sector that intermediates financial capital between firms. This structure implies a per period financial resource constraint which has a closed form solution and describes the transition path of unemployment and vacancies to their steady state values. We show that the transition path crucially depends on the degree of wage flexibility. When wages do not depend on the unempl…