Do Covid-19 mobility restrictions affect economic uncertainty in Italy? Evidence froma SVAR approach

The implications of Covid-19 are severe not only in terms of healthcare, but also from a socio-economic perspective. However, its impact on economic systems and the evaluation of related policy decisions are difficult to assess due to lack of related data. One possibility is to focus on the epidemic induced economic uncertainty: in this article we investigate the links between individual mobility limitations due to the pandemic outbreak and the resulting economic distrust in Italy, measured with an ad hoc Google Trend index. We propose an analysis based on Structural Vector Autoregressive models discovering a persistent surge in economic uncertainty as a response to Covid-19 and mobility shocks.