Work ethics, stay-at-home measures and COVID-19 diffusion: How is the pandemic affected by the way people perceive work?

Non-pharmaceutical interventions aimed at reducing the spread of COVID-19 rely largely on voluntary compliance among the target population to be effective, since such measures, which are aimed at the entire population, are very hard to enforce. In this paper, we focus on the impact of different work ethics on the spread of COVID-19. There are indeed reasons to believe that populations with different attitudes toward work will react differently to stay-at-home orders and other policies that forbid people from working. By means of a quantitative analysis, using hybrid model estimators, we test the impact of different work ethics on COVID-19 diffusion in a sample of 30 European countries. Results show that the more a population holds certain beliefs about work—namely, that it is humiliating to receive money without working, that people who do not work become lazy, and that work always comes first—the higher contagion rates of COVID-19 are, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, the more a population perceives work as a social duty, the lower contagion rates are. All this suggests that different work ethics matter in the containment of COVID-19.