This paper investigates how political incentives affect the government's response during a health epidemic, and the … affected by the epidemic. Voters, in turn, react by rewarding the incumbent government in areas where additional resources were …

) to evaluate the effects of vaccinations and variants on the epidemic and macroeconomic outlook. Vaccination plays the …, increasing the volatility of epidemic curves and worsening the macroeconomic outlook. If a more contagious variant emerges after …

during an epidemic? We study a setting where ICU resources are constrained while suppression is costly (e.g., limiting … suppression measures are continuously taken to hold down the spread throughout the epidemic, is suboptimal. Instead, the optimal … suppression is discountinuous. The epidemic should be left unregulated in a first phase and when the ICU constraint is approaching …