Will a major shock awaken US citizens to the threat of catastrophic pandemic risk? Using a natural experiment administered both before and after the 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak, our evidence suggests “no”. Our results show that prior to the Ebola scare, US citizens were relatively...

The COVID-19 pandemic poses novel health issues. However, the benefits and costs of the pandemic and policies to address it have a familiar economic structure. Chief among the health-related benefits are the monetized values of the U.S. mortality costs of $3.9 trillion in 2020. The combined U.S....