Since the spring of 2021, nearly 700 colleges and universities in the U.S. have mandated that their students become vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus. We leverage rich data on colleges’ vaccination policies and semester start dates, along with a variety of county-level public health...

International trade increased rapidly after 1990, fueled by the growth of a complex network of global value chains. Financial globalization gathered force. Trade globalization, however, reversed course since the Global Financial Crisis. The new trend is expected to endure after the Global...

Many small businesses have closed, lost revenues, or downsized as a response to health and economic disruptions caused by COVID-19. But, were economic losses in the pandemic disproportionately felt by businesses owned by people of color? This paper provides the first study of the impacts of...

The COVID-19 pandemic drew new attention to the role of school boards in the U.S. In this paper, we examine school districts’ choices of learning modality—whether and when to offer in-person, virtual, or hybrid instruction—over the course of the 2020-21 pandemic school year. The analysis...

For much of 2020, the COVID-19 epidemic upended social and economic life globally. In an effort to reduce COVID-19 risks in the U.S., state and local governments issued many recommendations and regulations to induce social distancing, adding to voluntary reductions in interpersonal contact. The...

We combined smartphone mobility data with census track-based reports of positive case counts to study a coronavirus outbreak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, where nearly three thousand students had become infected by the end of September 2020. We identified a cluster of twenty...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced federal, state and local policymakers to respond by legislating, enacting, and enforcing social distancing policies. However, the impact of these policies on healthcare utilization in the United States has been largely unexplored. We examine the impact of...

We use standardized end-of-course knowledge assessments to examine student learning during the disruptions induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining seven economics courses taught at four US R1 institutions, we find that students performed substantially worse, on average, in Spring 2020 when...

In the decade following the financial crisis of 2008, investment funds in corporate bond markets became prominent market players and generated concerns of financial fragility. The COVID-19 crisis provides an opportunity to inspect their resilience in a major stress event. Using daily microdata,...