Over the past two years, the number of COVID-19 cases has reached 676.3 million, resultingmore than 6.8 million deaths across the world and becoming a global crisis like no other inmodern history.2 The extensive containment and mitigation measures designed to restrictmobility and slow down the spread of COVID-19 caused the largest post-war recession (Coibon,Gorodnichenko, Weber, 2020; Eichenbaum, Rebelo, and Trabandt, 2020; Fornaro and Wolf, 2020;Hassan and others, 2020; Ludvigson, Ma, and Ng, 2020; Cevik and Miryugin, 2021). At the sametime, governments implemented policy measures to cushion the consequences of the pandemicand stimulate economic recovery. As a result, the COVID-19 pandemic—similar to other episodesof infectious diseases in history—has had largely heterogeneous effects across the world,reflecting the varying degree of exposure to the virus, composition of economic sectors, overalllevel of preparedness, and capacity for adequate public r esponse.