COVID-19 lockdown policy and heterogeneous responses of urban mobility: Evidence from the Philippines

Throughout 2020, national and subnational governments worldwide implemented nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to contain the spread of COVID-19. These included community quarantines, also known as lockdowns, of varying length, scope, and stringency that restricted mobility. To assess the effect of community quarantines on urban mobility in the Philippines, we analyze a new source of data: cellphone-based origin-destination flows made available by a major telecommunication company. First, we demonstrate that mobility dropped to 26% of the pre-lockdown level in the first month of lockdown and recovered and stabilized at 70% in August and September of 2020. Then we quantify the heterogeneous effects of lockdowns by city's employment composition. A city with 10 percentage points more employment share in work-from-home friendly sectors is found to have experienced an additional 2.8% decrease in mobility under the most stringent lockdown policy. Similarly, an increase of 10 percentage points in employment share in large and medium-sized firms was associated with a1.9% decrease in mobility on top of the benchmark reduction. We compare our findings with cross-country evidence on lockdowns and mobility, discuss the economic implications for containment policies in the Philippines, and suggest additional research that can be based on this novel dataset.