The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the need for better tracking and monitoring domestic and international investments in health, including on pandemic preparedness. The total official support for sustainable development (TOSSD) framework can help, as it captures both cross‑border flows to...

We provide a novel decomposition of changing gaps in life expectancy between rich and poor into differential changes in age-specific mortality rates and differences in "survivability". Declining age-specific mortality rates increases life expectancy, but the gain is small if the likelihood of...

How has government healthcare spending prepared countries for tackling the COVID19 pandemic? Arguably, spending is the primary policy tool of governments in providing effective health. We argue that the effectiveness of spending in reducing COVID deaths is conditional on the existence of...

COVID-19 may accelerate the automation of jobs as employers invest in technology to safeguard against pandemics. We identify occupations that have high automation potential and also exhibit a high risk of viral infection. We examine regional variation in terms of which U.S. local labor markets...

The cross-country relationship between Covid-19 crude mortality rates and previously measured income inequality and poverty in the pandemic’s first wave is studied, controlling for other underlying factors, in a sample of 141 countries. An older population, fewer hospital beds, lack of...

This study carries out a cross-country analysis of changes in quantity and quality of life during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic (11 March to 11 September 2020) for 124 countries. Changes in quantity of life are measured as life years lost to COVID-19, including excess deaths not...

Feedback control-based mitigation strategies for COVID-19 are threatened by the time span occurring before an infection is detected in official data. Such a delay also depends on behavioral, technological and procedural issues other than the incubation period. We provide a machine learning...

Differential access to health care is commonly cited as a source of heterogeneity in the health effects of environmental exposure, yet little causal evidence exists to support such claims. We test this hypothesis by utilizing exogenous variation in both access to health care and environmental...

Poor health may constrain women's capacity for active leisure, including family life and childrearing, for participation in the labor market and potentially affect preferences. Still, health remains remarkably understudied as a fertility determinant. We explore the association between health and...

COVID-19 is spreading and has reached the state of a worldwide pandemic and health systems are or will be tested in how they can deal with it. So far, during this early phase of the pandemic, outcomes in terms of case-fatality rates (CFR) differ widely across countries. We explore how...