Major crises—from terrorist attacks to outbreaks of disease—bring the trade-off between individual civil liberties and national security or well-being into sharp relief. In this paper, we study to what extent individual preferences for protecting rights and civil liberties are elastic to...

Shelter in place orders (SIPOs) require residents to remain home for all but essential activities such as purchasing food or medicine, caring for others, exercise, or traveling for employment deemed essential. Between March 19 and April 20, 2020, 40 states and the District of Columbia adopted...

While social capital is commonly held to support collective action, according to Putnam (2000) and Bourdieu (1986) social disparities may result in the formation of narrow social bonds that serve to exacerbate existing social cleavages and may serve as an impediment to effective collective...

With work a key vector of Covid‑19 transmission, this report examines why it is critical that occupational health and safety measures take centre stage in mitigation policies. Workers in sectors declared essential by state authorities have been mandated to continue working in physical settings...

Does social distancing harm innovation? We estimate the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—policies that restrict interactions in an attempt to slow the spread of disease—on local invention. We construct a panel of issued patents and NPIs adopted by 50 large US cities during...

We test for and measure the effects of cable news in the US on regional differences in compliance with recommendations by health experts to practice social distancing during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use a quasi-experimental design to estimate the causal effect of Fox News...

A majority of governments around the world unprecedentedly closed schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper quantitatively investigates the macroeconomic and distributional consequences of school closures through intergenerational channels in the medium-and long-term. The model...

This paper finds empirical evidence that faster and smarter containment measures were associated with lower fiscal responses to the COVID-19 shock. We also find that initial conditions, such as fiscal space, income, health preparedness and budget transparency were important in shaping the amount...

We examine how policymakers react to a pandemic with uncertainty regarding key epidemiological parameters by embedding a macroeconomic SIR model in a robust control framework. We find that optimal policy under uncertainty generates optimal mitigation responses that are asymmetric with respect to...

Were workers more likely to be infected by COVID-19 in their workplace, or outside it? While both economic models of the pandemic and public health policy recommendations often presume that the workplace is less safe, this paper seeks an answer both in micro data and economic theory. The...