The Covid-19 pandemic is estimated to have caused over 7 million deaths and reduced economic output by over $13 trillion to date. While vaccines were developed and deployed with unprecedented speed, pre-pandemic investments could have accelerated their widespread introduction, saving millions of...

At the onset of the COVID-19 economic crisis, as in other crisis episodes, the flight to safety was accompanied by a rapid appreciation of "safe haven" currencies. We quantify currency-induced balance sheet effects for total external positions as well as for individual asset classes using new...

The collapse of economic activity in 2020 from COVID-19 has been immense. An important question is how much of that resulted from government restrictions on activity versus people voluntarily choosing to stay home to avoid infection. This paper examines the drivers of the collapse using cellular...

This paper uses the onset of COVID-19 to examine how countries construct their policy packages in response to a severe negative shock. We use several new datasets to track the use of a large variety of policy tools: announced fiscal stimulus (both above- and below-the-line), monetary policy...

The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign is the largest public health campaign in history, with over 2 billion people fully vaccinated within the first 8 months. Nevertheless, the impact of this campaign on all-cause mortality is not well understood. Leveraging the staggered rollout of vaccines,...

We review economic arguments for using public policy to accelerate vaccine supply during a pandemic. Rapidly vaccinating a large share of the global population helps avoid economic, mortality, and social losses, which in the case of Covid-19 mounted into trillions of dollars. However,...

Operation Warp Speed (OWS) was a U.S. government-led program to accelerate the development, production, and administration of COVID-19 vaccines. The program cut the typical ten-year timeline needed to develop a new vaccine down to ten months and began vaccinating vulnerable populations within a...

We examine the first widespread use of capital controls in response to a global or regional financial crisis. In particular, we analyze whether capital controls mitigated capital flight in the 1930s and assess their causal effects on macroeconomic recovery from the Great Depression. We find...

What are the effects of a temporary lockdown of the economy? Do firms' deteriorating balance sheets and labor market frictions propagate and prolong the effects? We answer these questions in a model with financial and labor market frictions. The model makes quantitative predictions about the...