New data from Alexander Bick and Adam Blandin suggest that the flow of real GDP is 28 percent less than it would be under normal circumstances. Using two entirely different methods, I previously forecasted 25 percent and 26 percent. Below are the details of my calculations from Bick and Blandin.
Bick and Blandin (2020) find that working hours per working age adult circa April 1 declined 27 percent from February. Moreover, among those working in February 2020, between 59 and 61 percent are now absent from their workplaces either due to not working or working at home. If half of the capital in those workplaces is idle and not replaced by utilizing capital located in home offices, then capital utilization has fallen by 30 percent and GDP by 28 percent.
The GDP calculation assumes production-function exponents of 0.3 and 0.7, respectively.
This brings my estimate of the welfare cost of shutdown, relative to a normally functioning economy, of $7.1 trillion per year or $233 per household per workday. For this purpose I use the average GDP estimate from the "input method" cited above and the output method I used earlier.
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