Social Vulnerability and COVID-19 Pandemic Outcomes: Evidence from Spatial Quantile Regression

Abstract

This paper evaluates the empirical relevance of a prominent social vulnerability measure to local economic and public health outcomes at two distinct stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to traditional least-squares regression, conditional quantile regression offers stronger evidence in support of social vulnerability for predicting the pandemic’s uneven economic devastation and death tolls across the United States. An extension of the spatial autoregressive geographically weighted regression model to conditional quantile regression reveals the varying role of social vulnerability within and across broad regions that were exposed to different levels of pandemic impacts.