1 Running Head: MENTAL WELL-BEING AT THE ONSET OF COVID-19 Perceptions of an Insufficient Government Response at the Onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic are Associated with Lower Mental Well-Being Thiemo Fetzer1, Marc Witte2, Lukas Hensel3, Jon M. Jachimowicz*,4, Johannes Haushofer5, Andriy Ivchenko6, Stefano Caria1, Elena Reutskaja7, Christopher Roth1, Stefano Fiorin8, Margarita Gomez3, Gordon Kraft-Todd9, Friedrich M. Götz 10, Erez Yoeli11 1 University of Warwick, 2 NYU Abu Dhabi, 3 Oxford University, 4 Harvard Business School, 5 Princeton University, Busara Center, IFN, and Max Planck Institute for Collective Goods, 6 Expilab, 7 IESE Business School, 8 Bocconi University and IGIER, 9 Boston College, 10 University of Cambridge, 11 Massachusetts Institute of Technology *To whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail:
[email protected] Data and code available at: https://osf.io/3sn2k/ Abstract We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries (N = 108,075) at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—between March 20th and April 7th 2020—to explore how beliefs about citizens’ and government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the actions taken by governments, affected mental well-being. Our analyses reveal three findings. First, many respondents indicate that their country’s citizens and government’s response was insufficient. Second, respondents’ perception of an insufficient public and government response was associated with lower mental well-being. Third, we exploit time variation in country-level lockdown announcements, both around the world and through an event-study in the UK, and find that strong government actions—i.e., announcing a nationwide lockdown—were related to an improvement in respondents’ views of their fellow citizens and government, and to better mental well-being.