  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused more than 8 million confirmed cases and
500,000 death to date. In response to this emergency, many countries have
introduced a series of social-distancing measures including lockdowns and
businesses' temporary shutdowns, in an attempt to curb the spread of the
infection. Accordingly, the pandemic has been generating unprecedent disruption
on practically every aspect of society. This paper demonstrates that
high-frequency electricity market data can be used to estimate the causal,
short-run impact of COVID-19 on the economy. In the current uncertain economic
conditions, timeliness is essential. Unlike official statistics, which are
published with a delay of a few months, with our approach one can monitor
virtually every day the impact of the containment policies, the extent of the
recession and measure whether the monetary and fiscal stimuli introduced to
address the crisis are being effective. We illustrate our methodology on daily
data for the Italian day-ahead power market. Not surprisingly, we find that the
containment measures caused a significant reduction in economic activities and
that the GDP at the end of in May 2020 is still about 11% lower that what it
would have been without the outbreak.

General Economics;Economics