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,...

This article documents recent developments in emerging markets in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, assesses their prospects and challenges, and discusses appropriate policy settings for the medium term. It argues that EM policymakers' ability to grapple with an incomplete and uneven...

While the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting all countries, output losses vary considerably across countries. We provide a first analysis of robust determinants of observed initial output losses using model-averaging techniques-Weighted Average Least Squares and Bayesian Model Averaging. The results...

This paper provides evidence on the impact of major epidemics from the past two decades on income distribution. The pandemics in our sample, even though much smaller in scale than COVID-19, have led to increases in the Gini coefficient, raised the income share of higher-income deciles, and...

COVID-19 has had a disruptive economic impact in 2020, but how long its impact will persist remains unclear. We offer a prognosis based on an analysis of the effects of five previous major epidemics in this century. We find that these pandemics led to significant and persistent reductions in...

Corporate sector vulnerabilities have been a central policy topic since the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we analyze some 17,000 publicly listed firms in a sample of 24 countries, and assess their ability to withstand shocks induced by the pandemic to their liquidity, viability...

This paper makes contributions to the study of bilateral swap lines (BSLs). First, this paper fills a BSL information gap by constructing a comprehensive database of BSLs based on publicly available information, including after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Second, the paper provides the...

This paper argues that the type of COVID-19 containment measures affects the trade-offs between infection cases, economic activity and sovereign risk. Using local projection methods and a year and a half of high-frequency daily data covering 44 advanced and emerging economies, we find that smart...

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...