The sooner the better: lives saved by the lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak. The case of Italy
越早越好:意大利新冠疫情封锁挽救的生命
Summary This paper estimates the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions – mainly, the lockdown – on the COVID-19 mortality rate for the case of Italy, the first Western country to impose a national shelter-in-place order. We use a new estimator, the augmented synthetic control method (ASCM), that overcomes some limits of the standard synthetic control method (SCM). The results are twofold. From a methodological point of view, the ASCM outperforms the SCM in that the…