COVID-19: Who gets vaccinated and who gets sick? The role of personality, network, and institutions

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to many thousands of deaths in Sweden and the rest of the world, and significant economic costs.

Effective vaccinations have opened the path to a possible resolution of the crisis, but distribution of vaccines presents challenges: first, authorities have to prioritize groups and individuals for vaccination; second, individuals need to comply with vaccination offers. Little is known about the institutional and individual-level factors that drive these processes.

The purpose of the proposed project makes progress on this question in three ways.

First, we will analyze how vaccine prioritization is affected by the organization of vaccination, in particular, if private and public providers prioritize differently and if personal networks matter for being prioritized for vaccination.

Second, by linking vaccination data to individual-level register data on personality traits, such as social maturity and emotional stability, as well as cognitive ability, we will assess to what extent vaccine takeup is correlated with individual-level personality and cognitive variables.

Finally, to understand whether people with different personality traits are differentially prone to infection, we will link this personality data to individual-level data on COVID-19 infection outcomes.

Together, the proposed project will shed new light on both the institution-level and individual-level drivers of COVID-19 vaccinations and infections.