COVID infections and deaths in the United States have affected racial groups differentially. Until now, there has been no analysis of the role that structural racism plays in those health outcomes. We use three models of ascending complexity to quantify the state-level impacts of reporting bias,...

Underrepresentation of minority and poor households in scientific studies undermines policy decisions and public health. We study data from a serological study that randomized participation incentives. Participation is low (6% at $0, 17% at $100, 29% at $500) and unequal: minority and poor...

2017-2020 data from Medical Examiner Offices of 19 large U.S. counties is collected to study how suicides evolved during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. I use these data to obtain three key findings. First, I document that the total number of suicides per month was increasing during...

In our efforts to better understand how policies geared towards poverty reduction may impact teen childbirth, we analyzed the impact of the 10-20-30 provision of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA, P.L. 111-5) on teen childbirth. The 10-20-30 provision allocated at least...

Poverty is strongly associated with worse health across countries and within countries across individuals. However, not all poor individuals suffer from poor health: the effects of poverty on health vary across place and time. In this review, we discuss the evidence documenting these patterns,...

Anecdotal evidences point to effectiveness of COVID-19 social distancing policies, however, their effectiveness vis-a-vis what is driven by public awareness and voluntary actions have not been studied. Policy variations across US states create a natural experiment to study the causal impact of...

Climate change is complex during the best of times. It is commonly conceptualized as the quintessential global collective action problem: it affects those who do not contribute to it while the benefits of climate change mitigation measures are not restricted to those who pursue such measures....

A U.S. state-level analysis of factors associated with COVID-19 deaths reveals inequality (as defined by the Gini coefficient) to be far and away the strongest single-variable predictor, capturing 40% of vari ance in COVID deaths and 49% of variance in all-cause excess deaths since the start of...