The sooner the better: lives saved by the lockdown during the COVID-19 outbreak. The case of Italy
越早越好:意大利疫情封锁挽救生命的估计
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 latter…