CASPER, Wyo — A paper on the net benefits of social distancing policies produced by University of Wyoming Department of Economics researchers last spring has won the “the best applied article for 2020” from the journal that published it.
UW Associate Professor Linda Thunström was lead author of the article, titled “The Benefits and Costs of Using Social Distancing to Flatten the Curve for COVID-19,” published in the Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis last April.
The paper concluded that aggressive social distancing policies and major closures implemented at the start of the COVID-19 “were economically justified, such that the potential benefits of social distancing in saving lives far outweighed the projected damage to the economy,” UW said.
Assuming that social distancing measures were adopted widely enough to reduce contact among individuals, the benefits of those policies would outweigh the economic costs by $5.2 trillion, the team found.
Assistant Professor Stephen Newbold said the team used “the economist’s standard tool of benefit-cost analysis” to determine if the economic benefits of lives saved substantially outweighed the value of the projected losses to the U.S. economy.
Hundreds of media outlets around the world reported on the paper when it was published, according to UW.
Thunström said the team’s work aimed to “help policymakers…consider the trade-offs that societies face when addressing the pandemic. Our study aimed to be helpful in that regard and, in that sense, we are very thankful for the media attention it got, since all of that hard work by journalists helped catapult our study to government agencies around the globe.”
Thunström added, “Our results might not be applicable everywhere, but our study also offers a structure and suggests a modeling framework for how to think about the policy trade-offs,” Thunström added.
Professors David Finnoff and Jason Shogren, and graduate student Madison Ashworth, of Star Valley, joined Thunström also contributed.
