There is an ongoing merger wave in the US hospital industry, but it remains an open question how hospital mergers change, or fail to change, hospital behavior, performance, and outcomes. In this research, we open the “black box” of practices within hospitals in the context of a mega-merger...

Shelter-in-place ordinances were the first wide-spread policy measures aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19. Compliance with shelter-in-place directives is individually costly and requires behavioral changes across diverse sub-populations. Leveraging county-day measures on population...

Political polarization may undermine public policy response to collective risk, especially in periods of crisis, when political actors have incentives to manipulate public perceptions. We study these dynamics in the United States, focusing on how partisanship has influenced the use of face masks...

Physical distancing reduces transmission risks and slows the spread of COVID-19. Yet compliance with shelter-in-place policies issued by local and regional governments in the United States was uneven and may have been influenced by science skepticism and attitudes towards topics of scientific...

In this research note, we introduce and describe the collection of data on mask mandates in the United States. We detail the collection protocol as well as tools for accessing the data and offering feedback on amendments to the data. We present introductory visualization of the data. This...

We offer a theoretical model in which heterogeneous agents make individual decisions with negative external effects such as the extent of social distancing during pandemics. Because of the externality, agents have different individual and political preferences over the policy response....