Misfortunes Never Come Alone: From the Financial Crisis to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Is there a connection between the 2007-2009 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic? To answer this question we examine the relation between both macroeconomic and financial losses derived from the financial crisis and the health outcomes associated with the first wave of the pandemic. At the European level, countries more affected by the financial crisis had more deaths relative to coronavirus cases. We find an analogous significant relation across Spanish provinces and a transmission mechanism running from finance to health outcomes through cross-sectional differences in health facilities.