We study the impact of the 1918 Spanish Flu on U.S. stock prices. We use the death rate to control for the impact of the global pandemic and war news reported in the New York Times to capture the positive effects of the end of World War I on stock prices. Using a new weekly hand collected NYSE...

We provide the first revealed preference estimates of the benefits of routine weather forecasts. The benefits come from how people use advance information to reduce mortality from heat and cold. Theoretically, more accurate forecasts reduce mortality if and only if mortality risk is convex in...

Accurately determining the number of excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is hard. The most important challenge is accurately estimating the counterfactual count of baseline deaths that would have occurred in its absence. This analysis used new methods to: estimate this baseline metric;...

The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to the practice of medicine. In this paper, we explore how access to the hospital and modern medicine affects...

In this paper, we test whether the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions are associated with in-hospital maternal morbidity. The ACA expansions may have affected maternal morbidity by increasing pre-conception access to health care, and by improving the quality of delivery care through...

During the past fifteen years, more than 30% of US coal plants have had at least one coal-fired generator close. We utilize this natural experiment to estimate the effect of coal plant exposure on mortality and house values. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that, despite the...

The CDC reports that 1.13 million Americans have died of COVID-19 through June of 2023. I use a model of the impact over the past three years of vaccines and private and public behavior to mitigate disease transmission during the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States to address two questions....

This paper examines the relationship between extreme socioeconomic disadvantage and poor health by providing the first detailed and accurate picture of mortality patterns among people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. Our analyses center on 140,000 people who were sheltered or unsheltered...