Following Turkey's application for EU membership in 1987, a Customs Union (CU) between Turkey and the EU, mainly covering trade in manufacturing goods and processed agricultural products, came into effect in 1995. In addition to a large agricultural sector, Turkey also specializes in the...

We embed a lockdown choice in a simplified epidemiological model and derive formulas for the optimal lockdown intensity and duration. The optimal policy reflects the rate of time preference, epidemiological factors, the hazard rate of vaccine discovery, learning effects in the health care...

We study the competitive effects of restricting direct access to secondary care by gatekeeping, focusing on the informational role of general practitioners (GPs). In the secondary care market there are two hospitals choosing quality and specialisation. Patients, who are ex ante uninformed, can...

We compare health system responses to the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic in Italy and Spain. In both countries, healthcare is managed at the regional level, but the central government behaved differently in the uncertainty surrounding the first wave, leaving more autonomy to regional...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...

We develop an epidemic model to explain and predict the dynamics of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and to assess the economic costs of lockdown scenarios. The standard epidemic three-variable model, SIR (Susceptible, Infected and Removed) is extended into a five-variable model SCARE: Susceptible, Carrier,...

A growing literature studies the effect of enhancing the agency relationship between political incumbents and constituents on the use of health care, and specifically maternal and preventive care services. We examine the development of institutions of self-governance in India, and specifically...

Uniform health care delivered by a mainstream public insurer - such as the National Health Service (NHS), seldom satisfies heterogeneous demands for care, and some unsatisfied share of the population either use private health care, or purchase private insurance (PHI). One potential mechanism to...

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between globalization, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases, and associated deaths in more than 100 countries. Our ordinary least squares multivariate regressions show that countries with higher levels of socio-economic globalization...

This paper investigates the factors that contributed to the proliferation of online COVID skepticism on Twitter across Italian municipalities. We demonstrate that socio-demographic factors are likely to mitigate the emergence of skepticism, while populist political leanings were more likely to...