Inequality and the marginal well-being costs of lockdowns: the case of Chile’s local lockdowns design

This paper examines how heterogeneous lockdown policies can amplify pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities in well-being during public health crises. Using Chile’s municipality-level heterogeneous COVID-19 lockdown strategy as a case study, we assess whether local quarantines generated a double disadvantage for lower-socioeconomic-status populations: greater exposure to confinement and higher psychological costs when confined. We combine municipal-level lockdown records and socioeconomic data with a novel application of Google Trends to construct real-time indicators of population well-being. To address the geographical mismatch between nationally aggregated search data and local policy implementation, we exploit temporal variation in the socioeconomic composition of the confined population induced by staggered municipal lockdowns, which allows us to link changes in aggregate well-being indicators to shifts in confinement exposure across socioeconomic groups. Our results show that increases in the confined population are associated with significant rises in distress-related search activity, including boredom, loneliness, stress, worry, and self-care. These effects are substantially stronger when confinement disproportionately affects non-wealthy municipalities. We further show that, conditional on epidemiological risk, municipalities with lower income levels and higher concentrations of contact-intensive occupations faced systematically higher probabilities of being placed under lockdown. Taken together, these findings reveal a compounding mechanism through which local lockdown policies can exacerbate pre-existing inequalities: socioeconomically vulnerable populations were both more likely to be confined and more adversely affected by confinement. Methodologically, our study demonstrates how digital trace data can be combined with granular policy information to assess distributional well-being impacts in real time. Substantively, our results highlight the importance of incorporating equity considerations, and occupational structure into the design of non-pharmaceutical interventions.