This paper investigates how economic activity impacted Covid-19 infections and all-cause
mortality. To this purpose, we exploit the distribution of essential sectors, which were
exempted from a national lockdown enacted in Italy during the first wave of the pandemic,
across provinces and rich administrative data in a difference-in-differences framework. We
find that a standard deviation increase in essential workers per built square kilometre leads
to 1.1 additional daily cases and 0.32 additional daily deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. Back …