This paper studies the effect of an increase in import competition on informality along two margins. I consider the extensive margin, where workers are hired by unregistered employers and the intensive margin, where even though jobs are carried out in registered firms, employees are off the...

This paper provides a new picture of how countries have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by examining the effects of the pandemic in terms of normative foundations for societal wellbeing. Social prosperity depends primarily on the functioning of four domains: the economy, the state, civil...

Evaluating the sustainability of a society requires a system of shadow or accounting values derived from the sustainability objective. As a first step toward the derivation of such shadow values for a maximin objective, this paper studies an economy composed of two reproducible assets, each...

While the COVID-19 pandemic had a large and asymmetric impact on firms, many countries quickly enacted massive business rescue programs which are specifically targeted to smaller firms. Little is known about the effects of such policies on business entry and exit, factor reallocation, and...

Peoples' willingness to vaccinate is critical to combating the COVID-19 pandemic. We devise a representative experiment to study how the design of the vaccine approval procedure affects public attitudes towards vaccination. Compared to an Emergency Use Authorization, choosing the more thorough...

We examine the supply-side characteristics - unskilled labor, imported input intensity, dependence on inputs from China, production complexity - that determine different potential vulnerabilities of traded products to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on monthly exports at the product level by all...

Using recent data on the unvaccinated across U.S. states, this paper focuses on the determinants of vaccine hesitancy related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that more prosperous states and states with more elderly and physicians have lower vaccine hesitancy. There was some evidence of...

Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected pro-sociality among individuals? After the onset of the pandemic, many charitable appeals were updated to include a reference to COVID-19. Did donors increase their giving in response to such changes? In order to answer these questions, we conducted a...

This paper evaluates the impact of a sudden and unexpected nation-wide alcohol sales ban in South Africa. We find that this policy causally reduced injury-induced mortality in the country by at least 14% during the five weeks of the ban. We argue that this estimate constitutes a lower bound on...

We investigate how politico-economic factors shaped government responses to the spread of COVID-19. Our simple framework uses epidemiological, economic and politico-economic arguments. Confronting the theory with US state level data we find strong evidence for partisanship even when we control...