Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The available data from schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food processing plants, hair stylists, and airlines show employers adopting mitigation protocols in the spring of 2020. Coincident with the adoption, infection rates in workplaces typically dropped from well above household rates to well below. When this occurs, the sign of the disease externality from participating in large organizations changes from negative to positive, even while individuals continue to have an incentive to avoid large organizations due to the prevention costs they impose on members. Rational cooperative prevention sometimes results in infectious-disease patterns that are opposite of predictions from classical epidemiology.

More on this topic

BFI Working Paper·Feb 4, 2025

Local GDP Estimates Around the World

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg and Jialing Zhang
Topics: COVID-19, Economic Mobility & Poverty
BFI Working Paper·Jan 22, 2025

Network Rewiring and Spatial Targeting: Optimal Disease Mitigation in Multilayer Social Networks

Ozan Candogan, Michael D. König, Kieran Marray, and Frank W. Takes
Topics: Health care
BFI Working Paper·Jan 21, 2025

Disease, Disparities, and Development: Evidence from Chagas Disease Control in Brazil

Jon Denton-Schneider and Eduardo Montero
Topics: Development Economics, Health care