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...

This paper presents new evidence on international trade and worker outcomes. It examines a big world event that produced an unprecedentedly large shock to the UK exchange rate. In the 24 hours in June 2016 during which the UK electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, the value...

We study the incidence and extent of bribes paid to the doctors in the public health facilities which are cleverly identified using a nationally representative survey. The survey asks households about the fees paid to public doctors, not about the bribe, which makes it less prone to reporting...

Choropleth disease maps have become the main tool for communicating information about the geography of health threats to the public. These maps have the potential to shape perceptions of threat, preferences about policy, and perhaps even behavior, but they are unfortunately often poorly designed...

In response to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been substantial variations in policy response and performance for disease control and prevention within and across nations. It remains unclear to what extent these variations may be explained by bureaucrats'...

We exploit a quasi-experimental setting provided by an election day with multiple polls to estimate the effect of voters' turnout on the spread of new COVID-19 infections and to quantify the policy trade-off implied by postponing elections during high infection periods. We show that post-poll...

Travel restrictions are often imposed to limit the spread of infectious diseases. As uniform restrictions can be inefficient and incur unnecessarily high costs, this paper examines the optimal design of restrictions that target specific travel routes. We propose a model with trade-offs between...

Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policy makers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

Using monthly data from the Understanding Society (UKHLS) COVID-19 Survey we analyse the evolution of unmet need and assess how the UK health care system performed against the norm of horizontal equity in health care access during the first wave of COVID-19 wave. Unmet need was most evident for...

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...