Social distancing via shelter-in-place strategies, and wearing masks, have emerged as the most effective non-pharmaceutical ways of combatting COVID-19. In the United States, choices about these policies are made by individual states. We develop a game-theoretic model and then test it...

I consider the effect of empathy towards others on the internalization of interpersonal externalities and on private contributions to the provision of public goods. I show that if preferences are empathetic in the sense of depending on the well-being of others, then in an extreme case external...