We critically analyze the currently available status indicators of the COVID-19 epidemic so that state governors will have the guideposts necessary to decide whether to further loosen or instead retighten controls on social and economic activity. Overreliance on aggregate, state-level data in...

New York City has been rightly characterized as the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States. Just one month after the first cases of coronavirus infection were reported in the city, the burden of infected individuals with serious complications of COVID-19 has already...

New York City's multipronged subway system was a major disseminator - if not the principal transmission vehicle - of coronavirus infection during the initial takeoff of the massive epidemic that became evident throughout the city during March 2020. The near shutoff of subway ridership in...

The decades-long effort to produce a workable HIV vaccine has hardly been a waste of public and private resources. To the contrary, the scientific know-how acquired along the way has served as the critical foundation for the development of vaccines against the novel, pandemic SARS-CoV-2 virus....

This report describes an easily computable model of the relation between cigarette prices and cigarette consumption in the United States. The model is used to predict the revenue impacts of Federal excise tax hikes ranging from $0.45 to $1.76 per pack

As of March 31, 1987, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control had reported 33,350 cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome. Yet by that date, physicians had actually diagnosed 42,670 cases. The difference arises from significant delays in the reporting of AIDS cases to public health...

In recent years, several countries have implemented restrictive, abstinence-only policies toward reproductive health, as opposed to comprehensive, adolescent-friendly health services. Little is known, however, about the effects of these restrictive policies on adolescent birth rates at the...

We asked 97 cigarette smokers to make a series of 12 binary choices between experimental cigarette packages with varying warnings and background colors. Each smoker had to decide which of the two packages contained cigarettes less risky for his health. We tested whether the smokers, confronted...

We employ a latent class model to assess the impact of Mexico's Seguro Popular ("SP") program on the number of prenatal visits in a cross-sectional sample of 4,381 women who gave birth during 2002-2005. We specify an ordered probit model to permit a pregnant woman's probability of membership in...

Objective: We evaluated the impact of Seguro Popular (SP), a program introduced in 2001 in Mexico primarily to finance health care for the poor. We studied the effect of SP on pregnant women's access to obstetrical services. Data: We analyzed the cross-sectional 2006 National Health and...