Originating in China, the Coronavirus has reached the world at different speeds and levels of strength. This paper provides some initial understanding of some driving factors and their consequences. Since transmission requires people, the human factor behind globalization is essential....

More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying...

Since vaccination is the decisive factor for controlling the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to understand the process to vaccination success. We identify a variety of factors playing a crucial role including the availability of vaccines, pandemic pressures, economic strength (GDP),...

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in significant disruption in schooling worldwide. This paper uses global test score data to estimate learning losses. It models the effect of school closures on achievement by predicting the deviation of the most recent results from a linear trend using data from...

COVID-19 substantially decreased employment, but the effects vary among demographic and socioeconomic groups. We document the employment losses in April 2020 across various groups using the U.S. Current Population Survey. The unemployment rate understates employment losses. We focus on the...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in income and employment loss in many countries around the world. Yet, hardly any formal study exists on household finance and future economic expectations in poorer countries. To fill in this gap, we implemented and analyzed a web-based rapid assessment survey...

Overall mobility declined during the COVID-19 pandemic because of government lockdowns and voluntary social distancing. Yet, aggregate data mask important heterogeneous effects across segments of the population. Using unique mobility indicators based on anonymized and aggregate data provided by...

Given the assigned health inequalities faced by sexual minorities, it is fitting to assess whether m-health could be associated with better health-related outcomes for these sexual minorities. The present study examines associations between m-physical and m-mental health apps and sexual...

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought havocs on economies around the world. Yet, much needs to be learnt on the distributional impacts of the pandemic. We contribute new theoretical and empirical evidence on the distributional impacts of the pandemic on different income groups in a multi-country...

It is widely recognized that African Americans have a higher level of mistrust towards the medical and health care sector, which results in insufficient utilization of public health services, low participation in clinical research, and vaccination hesitancy. While the Tuskegee Syphilis Study has...