IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27019.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Covid-19: Testing Inequality in New York City

Author

Listed:
  • Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé
  • Ken Teoh
  • Martín Uribe

Abstract

Motivated by reports in the media suggesting unequal access to Covid-19 testing across incomes, we analyze zip-code level data on the number of Covid-19 tests, test results, and income per capita in New York City. We find that the number of tests administered is evenly distributed across income levels. In particular, the test distribution across income levels is significantly more egalitarian than the distribution of income itself: The ten percent of the city's population living in the richest zip codes received 11 percent of the Covid-19 tests and 29 percent of the city's income. The ten percent of the city's population living in the poorest zip codes received 10 percent of the tests but only 4 percent of the city's income. At the same time, we find significant disparity in the fraction of tests that come back negative for the Covid-19 disease across income levels: moving from the poorest zip codes to the richest zip codes is associated with an increase in the fraction of negative Covid-19 test results from 38 to 65 percent.

Suggested Citation

  • Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé & Ken Teoh & Martín Uribe, 2020. "Covid-19: Testing Inequality in New York City," NBER Working Papers 27019, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27019
    Note: EFG PE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w27019.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Joseph Benitez & Charles Courtemanche & Aaron Yelowitz, 2020. "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in COVID-19: Evidence from Six Large Cities," Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, Springer, vol. 3(4), pages 243-261, December.
    2. Graziella Bertocchi & Arcangelo Dimico, 2020. "COVID-19, Race, and Redlining," Department of Economics 0175, University of Modena and Reggio E., Faculty of Economics "Marco Biagi".
    3. Rachid Laajaj & Duncan Webb & Danilo Aristizabal & Eduardo Behrentz & Raquel Bernal & Giancarlo Buitrago & Zulma Cucunubá & Fernando de la Hoz, 2021. "Understanding how socioeconomic inequalities drive inequalities in SARS-CoV-2 infections," Documentos CEDE 19241, Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE.
    4. Bertocchi, Graziella & Dimico, Arcangelo, 2020. "COVID-19, Race, and Redlining," GLO Discussion Paper Series 603, Global Labor Organization (GLO).
    5. Almagro, Milena & Orane-Hutchinson, Angelo, 2022. "JUE Insight: The determinants of the differential exposure to COVID-19 in New York city and their evolution over time," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    6. Bárcena-Martín, Elena & Molina, Julián & Muñoz-Fernández, Ana & Pérez-Moreno, Salvador, 2022. "Vulnerability and COVID-19 infection rates: A changing relationship during the first year of the pandemic," Economics & Human Biology, Elsevier, vol. 47(C).
    7. Davide Furceri & Prakash Loungani & Jonathan D Ostry & Pietro Pizzuto, 2021. "The rise in inequality after pandemics: can fiscal support play a mitigating role? [Epidemics, inequality, and poverty in preindustrial and early industrial time]," Industrial and Corporate Change, Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC, vol. 30(2), pages 445-457.
    8. Annie Tubadji & Don J. Webber & Frédéric Boy, 2021. "Cultural and economic discrimination by the Great Leveller," Regional Science Policy & Practice, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(S1), pages 198-216, November.
    9. Bhattacharya, Joydeep & Chakraborty, Shankha & Yu, Xiumei, 2021. "A rational-choice model of Covid-19 transmission with endogenous quarantining and two-sided prevention," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C).
    10. Adham Sayed & Bin Peng, 2021. "Pandemics and income inequality: a historical review," SN Business & Economics, Springer, vol. 1(4), pages 1-17, April.
    11. Jung, Juergen & Manley, James & Shrestha, Vinish, 2021. "Coronavirus infections and deaths by poverty status: The effects of social distancing," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 182(C), pages 311-330.
    12. Rebecca Brough & Matthew Freedman & David C. Phillips, 2021. "Understanding socioeconomic disparities in travel behavior during the COVID‐19 pandemic," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 61(4), pages 753-774, September.
    13. Mounir Amdaoud & Giuseppe Arcuri & Nadine Levratto, 2021. "Are regions equal in adversity? A spatial analysis of spread and dynamics of COVID-19 in Europe," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 22(4), pages 629-642, June.
    14. Mangrum, Daniel & Niekamp, Paul, 2022. "JUE Insight: College student travel contributed to local COVID-19 spread," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    15. Almagro, Milena & Coven, Joshua & Gupta, Arpit & Orane-Hutchinson, Angelo, 2023. "Disparities in COVID-19 risk exposure: Evidence from geolocation data," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 102(C).
    16. Abadía Alvarado, Luz Karime & Gómez Soler, Silvia C. & Cifuentes González, Juanita, 2023. "Gone with the pandemic: How did Covid-19 affect the academic performance of Colombian students?," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 100(C).
    17. Chen, Zhuo & Li, Pengfei & Liao, Li & Liu, Lu & Wang, Zhengwei, 2024. "Assessing and addressing the coronavirus-induced economic crisis: Evidence from 1.5 billion sales invoices," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 85(C).
    18. L'aszl'o Czaller & GergH{o} T'oth & Bal'azs Lengyel, 2021. "Vaccine allocation to blue-collar workers," Papers 2104.04639, arXiv.org.
    19. Milena Almagro & Joshua Coven & Arpit Gupta & Angelo Orane-Hutchinson, 2020. "Racial Disparities in Frontline Workers and Housing Crowding during COVID-19: Evidence from Geolocation Data," Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute Working Papers 37, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    20. Yuval Arbel & Chaim Fialkoff & Amichai Kerner & Miryam Kerner, 2022. "Do population density, socio-economic ranking and Gini Index of cities influence infection rates from coronavirus? Israel as a case study," The Annals of Regional Science, Springer;Western Regional Science Association, vol. 68(1), pages 181-206, February.
    21. Jose Cuesta & Julieth Pico, 2020. "The Gendered Poverty Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Colombia," The European Journal of Development Research, Palgrave Macmillan;European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes (EADI), vol. 32(5), pages 1558-1591, December.
    22. Shibata, Ippei, 2021. "The distributional impact of recessions: The global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic recession," Journal of Economics and Business, Elsevier, vol. 115(C).

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I14 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health and Inequality
    • R1 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - General Regional Economics

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:27019. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.