offered than those that do not know one. However, the country level death rate in the week before the individual was interviewed bears no correlation with vaccine acceptance. This suggests the importance of the information set the individual uses to assess the risk of COVID-19 and to decide about vaccination. Rather than the overall epidemiological situation, it is the immediate experience with the pandemic that is associated with increased willingness to get vaccinated.

# _Government policy response_

The stringency of government policy response to the pandemic appears to be positively associated with vaccine acceptance: the more stringent the measures are, the higher the willingness of individuals to take the vaccine. Each additional unit in the Oxford Stringency Index is associated to a 0.4 percentage point higher vaccine acceptance. Moving from percentile 25 in the distribution of the index within our sample (a value of 55.09) to percentile 75 (a value of 74.54) would be associated to a 7.8 percentage point increase in individual vaccine acceptance, a magnitude similar to that of personally knowing a positive COVID-19 case. Such a change in lockdown policies, however, would not be associated with an immediate increase in vaccine acceptance. The nature of the data at hand - including the exact day when the survey was carried out for each individual – allows us to assess the effect of actual _changes_ in the stringency index, which is also measured daily. Columns 3, 4 and 5 of Table 2 include as additional regressors the 1-day change, 7-day change and 14-day change of the stringency index respectively. The negative coefficients associated to the change variables indicate that when government policy changes, the effect on vaccine acceptance is not immediate. In particular, the coefficients associated to the 7-day and 14-day changes suggest that during that period the overall effect of an increase of one unit in the stringency index is 0.2 and 0.3 percentage points respectively – lower than the 0.4 percentage point result in the longer term. In any case, column 6 suggests that there are diminishing marginal effects of stringency on vaccine acceptance as its squared term is negative and significant. Further, prolonged and very stringent measures seem to have an adverse effect on vaccine acceptance. Moving from the 25<sup>th</sup> percentile in the distribution of days above a stringency score of 80 (equal to 0 days in our estimation sample) to the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile (equal to 80 days, incidentally) is associated with a 9.6 percentage point _decrease_ in individual vaccine acceptance.<sup>9</sup> This phenomenon, or diminishing effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions, is witnessed also with respect to actual spread of the disease as well and has been termed as _lockdown fatigue_ in other work (Goldstein, Levy Yeyati and Sartorio, 2021).

An important aspect of government policy response to the pandemic that is not captured by the stringency index -which is focused on non-pharmaceutical interventions- is the deployment of a vaccination campaign. The first country to launch a COVID-19 vaccination campaign was the United Kingdom on December 8, 2020. In the weeks that followed, several countries -including the 18 countries in our sample- started their vaccination campaigns. The different specifications of Table 2 all show that the presence of an active vaccination campaign is associated with an increase in vaccine acceptance of around 9 percentage points, a magnitude slightly higher than the effect of personally knowing a COVID-19 positive case or the effect of an increase in the stringency index from the 25<sup>th</sup> to the 75<sup>th</sup> percentile of the distribution.

> 9 This is the product of the number of days implied by moving from the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile (80 days) times the coefficient associated to the effect of the number of days at high stringency on vaccine acceptance (-0.00123): 80 X - 0.00123 = -0.0984.

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