This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic in Taiwan as a natural experiment to test whether in utero conditions affect long-run developmental outcomes. Combining several historical and current datasets, we find that cohorts in utero during the pandemic are shorter as child/teenagers, less...

Burns and Mitchell (1946, 109) found a recession of “exceptional brevity and moderate amplitude.” I confirm their judgment by examining a variety of high-frequency, aggregate and cross-sectional data. Industrial output fell sharply but rebounded within months. Retail seemed little affected...

I jointly use daily data on deaths and public transportation ridership in San Francisco in 1918-19 to estimate a model in which agents choose their level of economic activity based on perceived infection risk, modeled as a function of current and lagged infections or deaths. Agents' choices in...

The current COVID-19 pandemic has attracted significant attention from epidemiologists and economists alike. This differs from the 1918-19 Spanish Influenza pandemic, when academic economists hardly paid attention to its economic features, despite its very high mortality toll. We examine the...

We attempt to apply a New Keynesian open economy model to simulate the economic consequences of influenza epidemic in Poland and measure the output loss (indirect cost) related to this disease. We introduce a negative health shock on the supply side of the economy and demonstrate that such a...

Various COVID-19 vaccines are available across the world. However, short phases of clinical trials for emergency use and myriad rumors about and misinformation on vaccines spread through different media sources, induce confusion and trigger vaccine hesitancy behavior. Although clinical trials...

In the late 19th Century, cities in Western Europe and the United States suffered from high levels of infectious disease. Over a 40 year period, there was a dramatic decline in infectious disease death in cities. As such objective progress in urban quality of life took place, how did the media...