| Summary: | Abstract What is the effect of social distancing policies on the spread of the new coronavirus? Social distancing policies rose to prominence as most capable of containing contagion and saving lives. Our purpose in this paper is to identify the causal effect of social distancing policies on the number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 and on contagion velocity. We align our main argument with the existing scientific consensus: social distancing policies negatively affect the number of cases. To test this hypothesis, we construct a dataset with daily information on 78 affected countries in the world. We compute several relevant measures from publicly available information on the number of cases and deaths to estimate causal effects for short-term and cumulative effects of social distancing policies. We use a time-series cross-sectional matching approach to match countries’ observable histories. Causal effects (ATTs and ATEs) can be extracted via a dif-in-dif estimator. Results show that social distancing policies reduce the aggregated number of cases by 4,832 on average (or 17.5/100 thousand), but only when strict measures are adopted. This effect seems to manifest from the third week onwards.
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