Schools across the United States and the world have been closed in an effort to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. However, the effect of school closure on COVID-19 transmission remains unclear. We estimate the causal effect of changes in the number of weekly visits to schools on COVID-19...

Vaccination rates have a statistically significant downward effect on the Covid-19 death rate across US counties, as of August 12, 2021. Controlling for poverty rates, age, and temperature lowers the magnitude of the estimate a little. Using the Biden-Trump vote in the 2020 election as an...

This paper provides the first nationally representative estimates of vulnerability to severe com-plications from COVID-19 overall and across race-ethnicity and socioeconomic status. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to examine the prevalence of specific health condi-tions...

We analyze the correlates of COVID-19 cases and deaths across US counties. We consider a wide range of correlates - population density, public transportation, age structure, nursing home residents, connectedness to source countries, etc. - finding that these variables are important predictors of...

Disease spread is in part a function of individual behavior. We examine the factors predicting individual behavior during the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States using novel data collected by Belot et al. (2020). Among other factors, we show that people with lower income, less flexible work...

This paper investigates the importance of the age composition for pandemic policy design. To do so, it introduces an economic framework with age heterogeneity, individual choice, and incomplete information, emphasizing the value of testing. Calibrating the model to the US Covid-19 pandemic...

How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their...

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...

We use linked survey and administrative data to document and decompose the striking differences across demographic groups in both economic and health impacts of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. The impacts of the pandemic on all-cause mortality and on employment were...

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? A 2020 US survey of beliefs about the lethality of Covid reveals that the elderly underestimate, and the young overestimate, their own risks, and that people with more health adversities are more...