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...

Health improvements in India, while significant, have not kept up with rapid economic growth rates. The poor in India face high out-of-pocket payments for health care, a significant burden of infectious diseases, and a rapidly increasing burden of non-communicable diseases. Against this...

We use analytical and numerical models to explain and quantify the welfare effects of subsidies for artemisinin combination treatments (ACTs), a valuable new class of antimalarial drugs. There are two (second-best) efficiency rationales for such subsidies: by expanding drug use, they reduce...

This paper develops and implements an analytical framework for estimating the optimal levels and welfare effects of alcohol taxes and drunk-driver penalties, accounting for externalities and how policies interact with the broader fiscal system. We find that the fiscal component of the optimal...

In response to the challenge of sustaining the health gains achieved in the better-performing states and ensuring that the lagging states catch up with the rest of the country, the Indian government has launched the National Rural Health Mission. A central goal of the effort is to increase...