I think results make sense and actually mirror much of complaints about a one-size fits all response. Also its hard to compare such manufacturing and agriculture-based economies and communities to the modern consumer-based economies.
Quote:
A main concern for our empirical approach is that the policy response may be endogenous. For instance, local officials may be more inclined to intervene if the local exposure to the flu is higher, which in turn may be correlated with other factors such as socio-demographic or geographic characteristics (Bootsma and Ferguson, 2007). Moreover,an alternative concern is that interventions reflect the quality of local institutions, including the local health care system. Places with better institutions may have lower costs of intervening, as well as higher growth prospects.
There are, however, important details that suggest that the variation across cities is unrelated to economic fundamentals and is instead largely explained by city location. First,local responses were not driven by a federal response, as no coordinated pandemic plans existed.12 Second, as discussed in Section 2, the second wave of the 1918 flu pandemic swept the country from east to west, affecting cities and states in the eastern part of the country earlier and more severely. Given the timing of the influenza wave, cities that were affected later appeared to have implemented NPIs sooner as they were able to learn from cities that were affected in the early stages of the pandemic (Hatchett et al.,2007). Consequently, the distance to the east coast seems to be best in explaining variation in NPIs across cities (see also Figure 3). The main identification concern thus becomes that differences across areas with aggressive and less aggressive NPIs are driven by a differential responses of cities in the west to the end of WWI, for instance, because they are more exposed to the agricultural boom and bust (Rajan and Ramcharan, 2015)
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The table further reveals that cities which reacted faster are indeed located further west,as reflected by a lower longitude. In line with being further west, those cities have a lower mortality in 1917 and in 1918 and are located in states whose industry tends to be oriented more toward agriculture rather than manufacturing. In our regressions, we thus control for the importance of agriculture in each city's state. Reassuringly for our purposes, other than differences in the longitude and the variation in the local industry structure, there are no observable differences across cities with different NPIs.
Cities hit later in the wave have time to read and react and make better choices based on evidence. Interesting they account for the state's level of agriculture and then are applying that standard to the city, no accounting for the size of the city relative to the rest of the state (think think metro NYC being 70% of NYs population). Also how many of those western cities were going to grow strongly anyways due the second industrial revolution, especially given WWI being over and the large numbers of people (immigrants and us-born) moving west?
