I show that the irreversibility of dying coupled with gradual information acquisition over time on the likely arrival and eventual effectiveness of vaccines confers a real option value to lockdown strategies that delay the incidence of a pandemic.The case for lockdown strategies becomes stronger...

This study exploits the introduction of high subsidies for anti-malaria products in Senegal in 2009 to investigate if malaria prevents parents to invest in child health. Building upon the seminal paper of Dowetal. (1999), we develop a simple model of health investments under competing mortality...

The paper provides new evidence on the ability to work from home (WFH) for hundreds of Dutch occupations and examines how WFH is related to various occupation-specific characteristics. This is done by linking several publicly available datasets from Statistics Netherlands, which contain...

COVID-19, credit risk, macro fundamentals, frailty factors, dynamic latent factorsWe investigate the relationship between macro fundamentals and credit risk, rating migrations and defaults during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that credit risk models that use macro fundamentals as...

This paper explores whether and why the pandemic differentially altered women and men's consumption behavior. After the 2020 wave of lockdown restrictions were lifted, women reduced consumption more than men. Data on self-reported reasons for consuming less reveals that gender differences in...

When designing schemes to help SMEs survive crises, the government typically faces asymmetric information, so that it cannot target the SMEs most worth saving. We show that the government can exploit the information in the borrower loan demand to improve policy targets compared with existing...

Prospective economic developments depend on the behavior of consumer spending. A key question is whether private expenditures recover once social distancing restrictions are lifted or whether the COVID-19 crisis has a sustained impact on consumer confidence, preferences, and, hence, spending....