The authors model COVID infections and COVID deaths, both reported and implied, for the 50 U.S. states as well as the District of Columbia, and separately for a sample of 33 countries, as a function of pre-existing circumstances that citizens have no ability to control over the short term. These...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Individuals...

In this paper, I propose a life cycle model of painkiller consumption that combines the theory of health deficit accumulation with the theory of addiction. Chronic pain is conceptualized as a persistent negative shock to lifetime utility that can be treated by pain relief medication. Some...

Forecasting during the COVID-19 pandemic entails a great deal of uncertainty. The same way that we would like electoral forecasters to include their confidence intervals to account for such uncertainty, we assume that COVID-19-related forecasts should follow that norm. Based on literature on...

Since testing for COVID-19 infections is not at all randomized over the general population, most epidemiological model forecasts of deaths are subject to `selection bias.' This paper updates and supplements Vinod and Theiss (2020), where the bias correction using generalized linear models (GLM)...

We offer state-wise forecasts of COVID-19 pandemic deaths for the week ending August 10, 2020 based on a sample selection model to correct for rationed and biased testing for the virus. We refer the reader to our earlier papers including Vinod and Theiss (2020b) and Vinod and Theiss (2020a),...

We construct a unified objective measure of health status: the frailty index, defined as the cumulative sum of all adverse health indicators observed for an individual. First, we show that the frailty index has several advantages over self-reported health status, particularly when studying...