We examine the role of the vaccine initiation rate in mitigating the international stock market volatility during COVID-19. Our findings reflect that the positive effect of the vaccine initiation rate assists in stabilizing the international stock markets. This possible effect is stronger for...

Accurate counts of cases and deaths are critical for devising an optimal pandemic response. Yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic has progressed, so too has the recognition that cases and deaths have been underreported, perhaps vastly so. Here, we present an econometric strategy to estimate the true...

Deutschland hat sich das Ziel gesetzt, bis zum 21. September 2021 70 % der erwachsenen Bevölkerung ein Impfangebot zu unterbreiten. Der Fortschritt der Impfkampagne hängt dabei wesentlich von drei Determinanten ab: der Impfstoffverfügbarkeit, den Impfkapazitäten sowie der Impfbereitschaft....

The lack of anticipation of a worldwide disruptive event such as the spread of the COVID-19 combined with the breakdown of market mechanisms for the most essential products needed to fight the disease left the governments of many countries unsure of how to react and, often, constrained their...

Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of crises and over the perceived failure of ‘the elites’, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected, especially in times of crisis. Using the...

Pandemics are a recurring feature of human history. The COVID-19 virus has several features that mean it poses a particularly severe challenge. It threatens to cause a collapse of hospital systems through a high number of serious cases arising in a short period of time, and this, rather than...

COVID-19 has revealed familiar problems in health economics and cost-benefit analysis and the "tragic choices" that sometimes must be made. Policymakers frequently have to attach a monetary value to a human life based on the number of years that a person might have left to live and that life's...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exerted a remarkable impact on stock market volatility around the globe. Can vaccination programs revert these adverse effects? To answer this question, we scrutinize daily data from 66 countries from January 1st, 2020, to February 18th, 2021. We provide convincing...