A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

A common narrative is that COVID-19 cost Trump re-election. We do not find supporting evidence; if anything, the pandemic helped Trump. However, we find substantial evidence that voters abandoned Trump in counties with large increases in health insurance coverage since the Affordable Care Act,...

This thesis consists of five independent chapters, studying how economic agents respond to unanticipated shocks. Chapter 1 shows that a well-intentioned policy can create unintended barrier to voting by creating seemingly small shocks to voting costs. Election administrators in Munich control...

While standard demand factors perform well in predicting historical trade patterns, they fail conspicuously in 2020, when pandemic-specific factors played a key role above and beyond demand. Prediction errors from a multilateral import demand model in 2020 vary systematically with the health...

World trade contracted dramatically during the global economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic. Disruptions in international supply chains were widely reported as governments imposed containment measures (lockdowns) to halt the spread of the disease. At the same time, demand declined as...

Rules-based trade is under attack and the WTO is at risk of marginalization. The COVID-19 pan-demic and its detrimental effects on public health, global supply- and value chains and industrial production, have brought back national export restrictions and stopped the free flow of goods and...

In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated attempts to contain its spread have created unprecedented hurdles to international trade. This paper reviews trade facilitation measures implemented in North and Central Asia (NCA), including transport and trade finance facilitation. All NCA countries have...

Within a few short weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic has accomplished what multiple wars (hot and cold) failed to achieve over the past 75 years: massive simultaneous disruptions of international and local supply chains.Policymakers operating at the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs understandably...

This paper analyzes a prominent dimension of the initial policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic observed in many countries: the imposition of export restrictions and actions to facilitate imports. Using weekly data on the use of trade policy instruments during the first seven months of the...