What are the long-run economic impacts of the policy responses to control pandemics? We investigate this question by exploiting state-collected data spanning one of the most consequential global pandemics in centuries, the 1918 influenza pandemic. Specifically, we use a difference-in-differences framework to examine the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), ultimately finding no long-run impact of NPIs on employment, positive or negative. Employment trends prior to 1918 suggest that World War One is an important confounding factor in analyses of the pandemic, since cities with tighter NPIs grew rapidly between 1914 and 1918. We identify new control variables that account for war production and find that social distancing did not have long run employment impacts. The evidence underscores the importance of accounting for confounding economic and policy factors for understanding the impact of pandemics on economic outcomes.

控制流行病的政策反应的长期经济影响是什么？我们通过利用国家收集的数据来调查这个问题，这些数据涵盖几个世纪以来最严重的全球流行病之一，即 1918 年流感大流行。具体来说，我们使用差异分析框架来检查非药物干预 (NPI) 的影响，最终发现 NPI 对就业没有长期影响，无论是积极的还是消极的。1918 年之前的就业趋势表明，第一次世界大战是大流行分析中的一个重要混杂因素，因为在 1914 年至 1918 年间，NPI 收紧的城市增长迅速。我们确定了新的控制变量来解释战争生产，并发现社会距离并没有影响对就业有长期影响。