Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...

In many countries, clientelist parties (or political machines) distribute selective benefits in contingent exchange for political support. Studies of clientelism should distinguish between substantively different patterns of machine politics. A fundamental but often overlooked distinction lies...

Many countries have responded (or have considered responding) to the COVID pandemic by modifying their intellectual property laws to ensure the availability of vaccines, medicines, diagnostics, and related information. Some have asked the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver to excuse any...

In 2019 and the early months of 2020, global trade faced two major albeit very different shocks, namely the United States-China trade war and the cascading response of the countries around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. While the former situation involved a pair of centrally-placed trading...