On March 18, Congress enacted the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, the first economic relief bill in response to the pandemic. It mandates that state Medicaid programs cover diagnosis and testing for COVID-19 at no cost to beneficiaries and includes a temporary, conditional 6.2...

Three months into the COVID-19 outbreak caused by a novel strain of coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2), the world is still in search of an effective therapeutic drug. Experimental drugs developed for other infections, such as Gilead's remdesivir, have been repurposed with unclear success. A recent small...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has caused one of the most serious social and economic losses to countries around the world since the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 (during World War I). It has resulted in enormous economic as well as social costs, such as increased deaths from the spread...

Networks of overlapping local governments are the front line of governmental responses to pandemics. Local governments, both general purpose (municipalities, counties, etc.) and special districts (school, fire, police, hospital, etc.), implement state and federal directives while acting as a...

Maintaining economic output during COVID-19 pandemic can result in benefits for a firm's shareholders but comes at a potential cost to public health. Using novel retail store-level data, we examine how a CEO's political leanings, measured by political donations, impacts this tradeoff. We...

We consider a model of network interactions where the outcome of a unit depends on the outcomes of the connected units. We determine the key network link, i.e., the network link whose removal results in the largest reduction in the aggregate outcomes, and provide a measure that quantifies the...

In response to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been substantial variations in policy response and performance for disease control and prevention within and across nations. It remains unclear to what extent these variations may be explained by bureaucrats'...

Elections define representative democracies, but also produce spikes in physical mobility if voters need to travel to electoral rooms. In this paper, we examine whether large-scale, in-person elections propagate the spread of COVID-19. We exploit a natural experiment from the Czech Republic...

In response to the outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), there have been substantial variations in policy response and performance for disease control and prevention within and across nations. It remains unclear to what extent these variations may be explained by bureaucrats'...

This paper examines the causal impact of diagnostic efficiency on the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1-day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and...