Figure 5

Effects of the Number of COVID-19 Cases and the Declaration of a State of Emergency on the Purchase Amount, the Number of Buyers, and the Purchase Amount per Buyer. This figure illustrates the results from the regressions of the purchase amount, the number of buyers, and the purchase amount per buyer in logs at the city-date level. The left panel shows the point estimates and 95% confidence intervals of the effect of the number of COVID-19 cases per 1000 persons averaged over one week on the purchase amount (blue), the number of buyers (red), and the purchase amount per buyer (green) in the five waves of COVID-19 in the sample period. The right panel shows the coefficients and 95% confidence intervals of the declaration of a state of emergency (SoE), separated into the months of the sample period and a semi-SoE, which is less restrictive than an SoE. The number of COVID-19 cases and the declaration of an SoE are given at the prefecture–date level. We take a log of the number of COVID-19 cases per 1000 persons plus 0.001 to incorporate possible nonlinear relationships. In all the regressions, the other independent variables are the number of neighboring prefectures in an SoE; the dummy variables for 1-4 weeks before and after the declaration of an SoE and a semi-SoE; and the city, date, and day-of-the-week fixed effects. The standard errors are clustered at the city level. N = 1,091,171