The Impact of the Coronavirus Lockdown on Mental Health: Evidence from the United States
The coronavirus outbreak has caused significant disruptions to people’s lives. We exploit variation in lockdown measures across states to document the impact of stay-at-home orders on mental health using real-time survey data in the United States. We find that the lockdown measures lowered mental health by 0.083 standard deviations. This large negative effect is entirely driven by women. As a result of the lockdown measures, the existing gender gap in mental health has increased by 61%.