Mask Mandate Costs

There is now an NBER working paper on this topic:

This paper presents the results from a hypothetical set of questions related to mask-wearing behavior and opinions that were asked of a nationally representative sample of over 4,000 participants in early 2022. Mask mandates were hotly debated in public discourse, and though much research exists on benefits of masks, there has been no research thus far on the distribution of perceived costs of compliance. As is common in economic research that aims to assess the value to society of non-market activities, we use survey valuation methods and ask how much participants would be willing to pay to be exempted from rules of mandatory community masking. The survey asks specifically about a 3 month exemption. We find that the majority of respondents (56%) are not willing to pay to be exempted from mandatory masking. However, the average person was willing to pay $525, and a small segment of the population (0.9%) stated they were willing to pay over $5,000 to be exempted from the mandate. Younger respondents stated higher willingness to pay to avoid the mandate than older respondents. Combining our results with standard measures of the value of a statistical life, we estimate that a 3 month masking order was perceived as cost effective through willingness-to-pay questions only if at least 13,333 lives were saved by the policy.

That is by Patrick Carlin, Shyam Raman, Kosali I. Simon, Ryan Sullivan, and Coady Wing.  A few comments:

1. Willingness to be paid magnitudes are often much higher than willingness to pay numbers.  Especially when issues of justice and desert are involved.  I know some people who might say: “I have a right to refuse a mask.  I’m not going to pay anything not to wear one, but you would have to pay me a million dollars to put it on.”  There are less extreme versions of this view, noting that even in quite normal laboratory circumstances WTBP can be 5x higher than WTP.

2. For many people the value of masking — either positively or negatively — depends on what others do.  Some might feel “I guess I can wear a mask, but if you make everyone do that, that is a gross Orwellian dystopia.”  Others, perhaps leaning more to the political left, might say: “I am willing to do my share, but of course I expect the same from everyone else.  Let us sing this collective song and with our masks dance to the heavens!”

3. Why not just look at what private sector establishments chose when the force of law was not present?  Don’t they have the best sense of how to internalize all the different factors behind what their customers want?  Of course the answer here will vary, depending on what stage of the pandemic we are in.