Macroeconomic Outcomes and COVID-19: A Progress Report
Brookings Papers on Economic Activity
Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde and Charles I. Jones

October 2020


This file describes how to replicate the results from the paper.

A single program run in Matlab will generate all results. It takes only
a few minutes to run:

   BPEAMaster.m  in the "Programs" subdirectory

NOTE: You need to download the file ChadMatlab.zip, unzip it, and make
sure those functions are on the matlab path before running BPEAMaster.m

   https://web.stanford.edu/~chadj/ChadMatlab.zip

The program BPEAMaster.m reads the data on Covid deaths, GDP, unemployment, Google
activity and then generates the plots.


/// DATA FILES ///

COVID:

time_series_covid19_deaths_global.csv from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_deaths_global.csv
time_series_covid19_deaths_US.csv from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19/master/csse_covid_19_data/csse_covid_19_time_series/time_series_covid19_deaths_US.csv
LondonMadridEtc.csv   -- update "by hand" from sources listed in the file
UID_ISO_FIPS_LookUp_Table.xls -- country codes, lat/long, and populations


ECONOMIC ACTIVITY: (in the Data subdirectory)

Data_GDP2020.xlsx            -- OECD (and other) GDP data for 2020
Global_Mobility_Report.csv   -- Download from https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/
State_Unemployment_Rates.xls -- from FRED (the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis)


Note on reading the Google Global Mobility Report data:

% To read the csv file
%   Use Matlab's "Home -> Import Tool". That works. Then save table as "GlobalMobilityReport.mat"
%   Note: be sure to change "sub_region_1" and "sub_region_2" to "text" types
%    -- Keep codes/names as "category"
