The Individual Welfare Costs of Stay at Home Policies

This paper reports the results of a choice experiment designed to estimate the private welfare costs of stay-at-home policies during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study is conducted on a large and representative sample of the Swedish population. The results suggest that the welfare cost of a one-month stay-at-home policy, restricting non-working hours away from home, amounts to 9.1 percent of Sweden's monthly GDP. Moreover, we find that stricter and longer lockdowns are disproportionately more costly than lenient ones, indicating that strict policies are cost-effective only if they are much more successful in slowing the spread of the disease.