Previous evidence indicates trust is an important correlate of compliance with COVID-19 containment policies. However, this conclusion hinges on two crucial assumptions: first, that compliance does not change over time, and second, that mobility or self-reported measures are good proxies for...

The urgency of the two crises, especially the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed the inadequacy of traditional statistical datasets and models to provide a timely support to the decision-making process in times of volatility. Drawing upon advances in data analytics for public policy and the increasing...

The more conservative among us believe that "Big Data is a fad that will soon fade out" and they may in fact be partially right. By contrast, others - especially those who dispassionately note that digitization is only now beginning to deliver its payload - may beg to differ. We argue that all...

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets and industry codes. This paper uses innovative "big data" resources to...

Recent advancements in data collection have expanded the tools and information available for urban and spatial-based research. This paper presents an overview of spatial big data sources used in urban science and urban economics, with the goal of directing and enriching future research by other...

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...

We study the efficiency in health systems generated by community health teams, a common strategy in low- and middle-income countries for primary healthcare delivery. We exploit the rollout of a nation-wide expansion of coverage to this model in El Salvador. Using a panel dataset of...

We present results from a nationally representative survey of American adults, guided by a simple theoretical model expressing health care-seeking behavior as a function of economic and behavioral fundamentals and highlighting the role of trust. We report several findings. First, we document a...

We show that ordinary appointments can act as effective substitutes for hard commitment devices and increase demand for a critical healthcare service, particularly among those with self-control problems. We show this using an experiment that randomly offered HIV testing appointments and hard...

Traffic jams are an important problem both on an individual and on a societal level and much research has been done on trying to explain their emergence. The mainstream approach to road traffic monitoring is based on crowdsourcing roaming GPS devices such as cars or cell phones. These systems...