As more and more countries have employed stay-at-home policy to halt the spread of COVID-19, the effectiveness of this policy has become an important question to both researchers and policymakers. To answer this question, our paper empirically measures the effect of stay-at-home policy on the...

Typical government responses to pandemics involve social distancing measures designed to curb disease propagation. We evaluate the impact of state-mandated business closures in the context of the Covid-19 crisis in the US. Using state-level variations in the set of sectors forced to shut down,...

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 study the COVID-19 pandemic's effect on college students' government- and market-attitudes using within-subject comparisons of survey responses elicited before and after the onset of the pandemic. We find that support for markets significantly declines after the onset of the pandemic, with...

Using 311 sovereign rating actions by the three leading global rating agencies between January and August 2020, we show that severity of sovereign ratings actions is not affected by the intensity of the COVID-19 health crisis (proxied by case and mortality rates). We find that economic...

By Election Day 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had killed 234,244 Americans and caused the sharpest macroeconomic downturn in US history. Regression analysis shows that in a “no pandemic” counterfactual or a counterfactual in which the severity of the pandemic was mitigated by 30 percent,...

We argue that the policy response to the COVID-19 pandemic by all levels of government around the world is not consistent with recommendations from standard welfare economics. Thus, it is important to ask why such policies have been adopted. That opens the door to examining the political economy...

How should unemployment benefits vary in response to the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question by computing the optimal unemployment insurance response to the COVID-induced recession.We compare the optimal policy to the provisions under the CARES Act—which...

Faced with a pandemic, how does the government decide whether to shut down the economy or employ less economically-damaging mitigation measures, and what are the second-best distortions in this decision? We address this question from a positive (how does) rather than a normative (how should)...

How should unemployment benefits vary in response to the economic crisis induced by the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question by computing the optimal unemployment insurance response to the COVID-induced recession.We compare the optimal policy to the provisions under the CARES Act-which...