This paper documents the development of a 2019 Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) for Kenya. A special feature of this SAM is its spatial disaggregation according to malaria epidemiological and agroecological zones. It is built using data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (e.g., the...

We develop a novel empirical approach to identify the effectiveness of policies against a pandemic. The essence of our approach is the insight that epidemic dynamics are best tracked over stages, rather than over time. We use a normalization procedure that makes the pre-policy paths of the...

This paper investigates the role of testing and age-composition in the Covid-19 epidemic. We augment a standard SIR epidemiological model with individual choices regarding how much time to spend working and consuming outside the house, both of which increase the risk of transmission. Individuals...

This paper investigates the importance of the age composition for pandemic policy design. To do so, it introduces an economic framework with age heterogeneity, individual choice, and incomplete information, emphasizing the value of testing. Calibrating the model to the US Covid-19 pandemic...

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...

This paper reviews the effectiveness and efficiency of key policy instruments for MDG (Millennium Development Goals) achievement. We first demonstrate that average MDG progress is likely to be too slow to meet the education and health sector targets in a number of developing countries. We also...

Recent events have, once again, catapulted microbes into the forefront of media crisis-reporting. No sooner than the wandering TB-carrier evading the CDC's dragnet fades from our newspapers, (along with the sudden emergence and disappearance of SARS, the threat from Saddam's smallpox, and the...