This study documents how the demographics of new infections and mortality changed over time across US counties. We find that counties with a larger population share aged above 60 were hit harder initially in terms of both cases and mortality in March and April while counties with a larger...

Policymakers have implemented a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions to fight the spread of COVID-19. Variation in policies across jurisdictions and over time strongly suggests a difference-in-differences (DD) research design to estimate causal effects of counter-COVID measures. We...

More than a year since the first outbreak in China in December 2019, most countries are still struggling to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. Mass antigen testing has been proposed as an instrument to mitigate the spread of the disease and allow the economy to re-open. We investigate the potential...

Using detailed daily information covering 100 countries and an event-study approach, we estimate the short run effects of implementing Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) on the spread of the COVID-19 virus at the early stages of the pandemic. We study the impact of two NPIs -stay-at-home...

This article scrutinizes the idea that the World Economic Forum (WEF) had a significant influence on the scale and scope of the non-pharmaceutical pandemic interventions (NPIs) implemented in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We tested for associations between the country-level distribution of an...

We examine the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical government interventions (NPIs) against COVID-19. In particular, we focus on the impact of strictness and variability in government interventions on the reproduction rate (Rt) and the number of new deaths (per million of inhabitants) in five...

Decisions on public health measures to contain a pandemic are often based on parameters such as expected disease burden and additional mortality due to the pandemic. Both pandemics and nonpharmaceutical interventions to fight pandemics, however, produce economic, social, and medical costs. The...

This paper examines macroeconomic effects and transmission mechanisms of COVID19 in Mongolia, a developing and commodity-exporting economy, by estimating a Bayesian structural vector autoregression on quarterly data. We find strong cross-border spillover effects of COVID-19. Our estimates...