On Coase and COVID-19

From an epidemiological perspective, the COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis. From an economic perspective, it is an externality and a social cost. Strikingly, almost all economic policy to address the infection externality has been formulated within a Pigovian analysis of implicit taxes and subsidies directed by a social planner drawing on social cost-benefit analysis. In this paper we examine the alternative economic methodology of the externality. We seek to understand how an exchange-focused and institutional analysis provides a better understanding of how to minimise social cost. Our Coasean framework allows us to further develop a comparative institutional analysis of the pandemic response.