Titelaufnahme

We explore the role of social capital in the first wave of the recent Covid- 19 pandemic in independent analyses for Austria, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Exploiting within-country variation, we show that a one standard deviation increase in social capital leads to between 14% and 40% fewer Covid-19 cases per capita accumulated from mid-March until end of June, as well as between 7% and 16% fewer excess deaths per capita. Our results have important implications for the design of local containment policies in possible future waves of the pandemic.