This paper investigates the impact of infectious diseases on the evolution of sovereign credit default swap (CDS) spreads for a panel of 77 advanced and developing countries. Using annual data over the 2004-2020 period, we find that infectious-disease outbreaks have no discernible effect on CDS...

A universal testing and isolation policy is the most viable way to vanquish a pandemic. Its implementation requires: (i) an epidemiological rather than clinical approach to testing, sacrificing accuracy for scalability, convenience and speed; and (ii) state intervention to ramp up production,...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated policy responses triggered a historically large wave of capital reallocation between markets and asset classes. Using high-frequency country-level data, this paper examines if and how the number of COVID cases, the stringency of the lockdown, and the fiscal...

The health and economic consequences of COVID-19 are closely tied to individual compliance with recommended protective behaviors. We examine the determinants of this compliance using survey data from the COVID Behavior Tracker for 29 advanced and emerging market economies between March and...

We quantify the effect of mask mandates in the United States. Our regression discontinuity design exploits county-level variation in COVID-19 cases, hospital admissions, and deaths across the border between states with and without mandates. We find a significant and substantial effect-mask...

Epidemics may have social scarring effects, increasing the likelihood of social unrest. They may also have mitigating effect, suppressing unrest by dissuading social activities. Using a new monthly panel on social unrest in 130 countries, we find a positive cross-sectional relationship between...

Voluntary and government-mandated lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have caused causing drastic reductions in economic activity around the world. We present a parsimonious two-country-SIR model with some degree of substitutability between home and foreign goods, and show that trading partners'...

Mexico has had one of the highest death tolls from Covid-19 and among the largest declines in output compared to peers. This paper utilizes data on Mexico's thirty-two states to better understand the relationship between health and economic outcomes. For instance, did the states with worse...