Using newly digitized U.S. city-level data on hospitals, we explore how pandemics alter preferences for healthcare. We find that cities with higher levels of mortality during the Great Influenza of 1918-1919 subsequently expanded hospital capacity by more than cities experiencing less influenza...

We report a large-scale randomized controlled trial designed to assess whether the partisan cue of a provaccine message from Donald Trump would induce Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines. Our study involved presenting a 27-second advertisement to millions of U.S. YouTube users in October 2021....

There is a growing body of evidence showing that negative childhood health shocks have long term consequences in terms of health, human capital formation and labor market outcomes. However, by altering the relative prices of child quality across siblings, these health shocks can also affect...

We use dynamic panel data models to generate density forecasts for daily Covid-19 infections for a panel of countries/regions. At the core of our model is a specification that assumes that the growth rate of active infections can be represented by autoregressive fluctuations around a downward...

We build a minimalist model of the macroeconomics of a pandemic, with two essential components. The first is productivity-related: if the virus forces firms to shed labor beyond a certain threshold, productivity suffers. The second component is a credit market imperfection: because lenders...

Covid-19 is the single largest threat to global public health since the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-20. Was the world better prepared in 2020 than it was in 1918? After a century of public health and basic science research, pandemic response and mortality outcomes should be better than in...