Everyone Knows What You Did: Evidence from Public Disclosure of Travel Logs

The paper investigates the effect of public disclosure of detailed location information from people who tested positive for COVID-19 in South Korea. I use the actual travel histories of confirmed individuals including locations they visited before being quarantined, foot traffic measures based on mobile phone signals, consumer spending data based on card transactions, and the number of new jobs at the district level in Seoul. I find that public disclosure of the travel histories in a given district decreased foot traffic, consumer spending, and new employment there in the short run and did not increase new confirmed cases in exposure locations. The results suggest that public disclosure caused economic losses in the short term, but played a role in preventing the transmission of infections.