This paper assesses the relationship between cash transfers to families and subsequent childbearing. We take advantage of a cash-for-care (CFC) policy introduced in Norway in 1998, and compare the fertility behaviour of eligible and ineligible mothers over a four year period. Contrary to...

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...

We develop a flexible single-state model to represent tradeoffs between infections and activity during the early phase of an epidemic. We prove that optimal policy is continuous in the state but discontinuous in the deterministic arrival date of a cure; optimal lockdowns are followed by stimulus...