temperature played a significant role for the spread of COVID-19 in 122 cities in China. Holtmann et al. (2020) also find that weather conditions affect the initial stages of the spreading of Coronavirus in 47 countries, with higher temperatures leading to slower spreading. While ambient temperatures may affect the COVID-19 survival in the environment, it is also possible that a population confined to indoor activities is more susceptible to the infection. We thus control for the minimum temperature ( _Temp_ ) recorded each day in each country and expect that higher temperatures may induce governments to delay the adoption of CCMs ( 8 < 0). **Given that most of the CCMs entail the curtailing of individual liberties and the** ββ **pandemic has a global nature, political regimes and external pressures or demonstration effects from outside may also influence the adoption of CCMs** . More democratic regimes may find difficulties in restricting individual liberties affecting mobility and social contact, while autocratic regimes tend to be more able to apply tighter restrictions to contain the pandemic. We control for a measure of democracy levels obtained from The Economist (2020) database and expect 9 < 0 _._ In addition to internal pressures to implement or delay the adoption of CCMs, authorities have faced international pressure and learned from the experience of other countries in dealing with the pandemic. In particular, the adoption of ββ stringency measures in Western European countries, which were among the first to suffer from massive contagion, influenced the speed at which other countries implemented CCMs. We use a measure of the stringency of CCMs in 26 European economies as a demonstration effect for the adoption of CCMs in the world and expect 10 > 0.<sup>4</sup> ββ

## **4.** Econometric Results

# _a. Adoption of CCMs_

**The econometric results of our estimations for the adoption of CCMs are presented**

**in Table 1.** We have grouped the results according to the two categories described above (those that mainly restrict individual liberties reducing mobility and social contacts and those that limit activities). Tests indicate that there is evidence of country heterogeneity (individual effects are not zero as shown in the high proportion of total variance due to panel-level variance) and that PanelProbit techniques are required to ensure an adequate specification. The models present a reasonable fit to the observed data, as shown in McKelvey & Zavoina's pseudo R<sup>2</sup> indicators, ensuring that our instruments are highly –but not perfectly—correlated to the CCM.

**The results match the theoretical priors and most right-hand-side variables are statistically significant** . The evidence supports the above discussion on the determinants of having pandemic control measures in place. As expected, as the number of cases and casualties increases there is a higher probability of countries adopting CCMs, particularly those that limit the mobility and contact of individuals. In the same vein, we found that the number of days

> 4 Included countries are Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Great Britain.

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