SIR economic epidemiological models with disease induced mortality

Abstract This paper studies an optimal growth model where there is an infectious disease with S I R dynamics which can lead to mortality. Health expenditures (alternatively intensity of lockdowns) can be made to reduce infectivity of the disease. We study implications of two different ways to model the disease related mortality – early and late in infection mortality – on the equilibrium health and economic outcomes. In the former, increasing mortality reduces infections by decreasing the fraction of infectives in the population, while in the latter the fraction of infectives increases. We characterize the steady states and the outcomes depend in the way mortality is modeled. With early mortality, increasing mortality leads to higher equilibrium per capita output and consumption while in the late mortality model these decrease. We establish sufficiency conditions and provide the first results in economic models with S I R dynamics with and without disease related mortality – a class of models which are non-convex and have endogenous discounting so that no existing results are applicable.