This paper examines the impact of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) in China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of an NRPS policy expansion that began in 2009, we used a difference-in-difference approach to study the effects of the introduction of pension benefits on the health status,...

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....

Italy was among the first countries to introduce drastic measures to reduce mobility in order to prevent the diffusion of Covid-19. On March 9, 26 out of 111 provinces were subject to severe limitations on individual mobility between municipalities. One day later, new restrictive measures were...

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...

China and some other Asian countries have experienced skewed sex ratios, triggering intense competition and pressure in the marriage market. Meanwhile, China has more smokers than any other country, with half of men smoke while few women smoke. Men are the major income earners in most Chinese...

I analyze the demand side impacts of a supply side intervention into the market for illegal drugs in what has been described as America's largest open air drug market. Beginning in 2018, the Pennsylvania Attorney General's office and the Philadelphia Police Department engaged in an ambitious...

A small but significant literature concludes that terrorism impacts the economy, although the impact of mass-shooting has not yet been addressed by economists. We compare the economic effects of two tragedies: the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing and the 2012 Sandy Hook School Shooting. Fatal...

Subjective well-being (SWB) data is increasingly used to perform welfare analyses. In- terpreted as 'experienced utility', SWB has recently been compared to 'decision utility' using specific experiments, most often based on stated preferences. Results point to an overall congruence between these...