To fight the spread of COVID-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior and (b) the spread of the epidemic. Combining...

Elections may take place in precarious environments that even pose health risks. I consider the case of Bavaria, where close to ten million people were asked to vote in the municipal elections on March 15 of 2020, to quantify the toll of elections in a pandemic. Despite declaring a state of...

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic had an enormous impact on social and economic life and in particular. for human health care. In this paper, we document the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying policies on individual health care utilization. We use detailed administrative...

This paper investigates the impact of the public smoking ban which came into eff ect in Italy on January 2005 on individual smoking behaviour. Current empirical evidence supports the existence of a negative eff ect of the Italian ban on smoking prevalence and consumption in the general...

Despite the fact that 30 percent of opioid overdoses also involve a benzodiazepine, there is little policy guidance on how to curb concurrent misuse and even less evidence on how changes to co-prescribing practices can affect patients' economic trajectories. In 2012, Austria restricted access to...