A Shot at the Recovery: Quantifying the Impact of the COVID-19 Vaccine Lotteries on Measures of Activity

This paper investigates the impact of vaccine lotteries in the United States on spending, mobility, and employment, three dimensions of activity representing novel outcomes relative to the existing literature. This analysis combines hand-collected data on the introduction of vaccine lotteries across states over the second and third quarters of 2021 with daily state-level data from Fiserv (spending), Apple and Google (mobility), and Homebase (employment). In a dynamic event design setting, lotteries significantly boosted retail spending but did not meaningfully affect other measures of activity. As the introduction of the lotteries was largely unexpected and there were no significant pre-trends, we argue that these effects can be interpreted causally, differently from the contributions strictly relating vaccinations and economic outcomes. Finally, these effects were translated into implications for economic growth. Under the assumption that there were no meaningful substitution patterns, the findings imply that the introduction of lotteries added 0.4 percentage points to gross domestic product growth in 2021.