A key issue for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is whether non-pharmaceutical public-health interventions (NPIs) retard death rates. Good information about these effects comes from flu-related excess deaths in large U.S. cities during the second wave of the Great Influenza Pandemic, September...

Despite the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an ongoing debate regarding the effectiveness of the stay-at-home order implemented in many states. While proponents believe that the order helps reduce person-to-person contacts and therefore the spread of the pandemic, opponents...

The paper presents early research on problems that make an application of the basic SIR-model of epidemiology difficult for short- and medium-run policy. The model essentially generalizes the simple SIR model in two respects. First, it generalizes the relation n_t = βY_t to account for the...

The Covid-19 pandemic has motivated a myriad of studies and proposals on how economic policy should respond to this colossal shock. But in this debate it is seldom recognized that the health shock is not entirely exogenous. Its magnitude and dynamics themselves depend on economic policies, and...

The COVID-19 pandemic has great adverse impacts on personal life, the U.S. economy, and the world economy. Freezing all human activities is not a sustainable measure. Thus we want to develop a public intervention framework that allows people to resume personal and economic activities. In this...

The globalization of COVID-19 pandemic and its economic impacts is set to run havoc across all economies in the world, throwing many into recession and possibly economic depression. As the numbers of infected and death cases rise sharply and recovery from the pandemic remains uncertain even in...

Without a vaccine for COVID-19, the pandemic will be here for some time. Measures such as social distancing and robust surveillance can control the spread of the disease, but there will always be a risk that a flare-up will take lives, especially those of elderly and immunocompromised...

We extend the baseline Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) infectious disease epidemiology model to understand the role of testing and case-dependent quarantine. Our model nests the SEIR model. During a period of asymptomatic infection, testing can reveal infection that otherwise...

Do non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) aimed at reducing mortality during a pandemic necessarily have adverse economic effects? We use variation in the timing and intensity of NPIs across U.S. cities during the 1918 Flu Pandemic to examine their economic impact. While the pandemic itself was...

We extend the baseline Susceptible-Exposed-Infectious-Recovered (SEIR) infectious disease epidemiology model to understand the role of testing and case-dependent quarantine. Our model nests the SEIR model. During a period of asymptomatic infection, testing can reveal infection that otherwise...