In response to the two waves of Covid-19 in 2020, the Italian government implemented a general lockdown in March, but geographically targeted policies during fall. We exploit this natural experiment to compare the effects of the two policies in a difference-in-differences design, leveraging a...

Macroeconomic disasters (wars, pandemics, depressions) are characterized by drastic shifts and increased volatility of the aggregate consumption to income ratio. By standard intertemporal budget constraint logic, this ratio is linked to expectations of future income and consumption growth rates....

Schools have been very central in the debate about COVID-19. On one hand, there have been many supporters of the argument to keep them open, for their importance for the youngsters, and for the effort many countries played in establishing protocols to keep them safe. On the other hand, a...

Feedback control-based mitigation strategies for COVID-19 are threatened by the time span occurring before an infection is detected in official data. Such a delay also depends on behavioral, technological and procedural issues other than the incubation period. We provide a machine learning...

Identifying structural breaks in the dynamics of COVID-19 contagion is crucial to promptly assess policies and evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures. However, official data record infections after a critical and unpredictable delay. Moreover, people react to the health risks of the...