Understanding the effectiveness of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 is crucial to justify economically costly social distancing measures. We present a case study focusing on the three Scandinavian countries. Whereas Denmark and Norway imposed relatively strict measures, Sweden follows...

Research in Economics on COVID-19 posits an economy subject to disease dynamics, which are often seriously misspecified in terms of speed and scale. Using a social planner problem, we show that such misspecifications lead to misguided policy. Erroneously characterizing a relatively slow-moving...

In response to the two waves of Covid-19 in 2020, the Italian government implemented a general lockdown in March, but geographically targeted policies during fall. We exploit this natural experiment to compare the effects of the two policies in a difference-in-differences design, leveraging a...

We examine the deep roots of preferences for vaccination against COVID-19, moving beyond proximate factors which can only account for part of the observable heterogeneity in the willingness to get vaccinated. Our model on experience-based learning predicts that exposure to past disruptive crises...

Understanding the effectiveness of social distancing on the spread of COVID-19 is crucial to justify economically costly social distancing measures. We present a case study focusing on the three Scandinavian countries. Whereas Denmark and Norway imposed relatively strict measures, Sweden follows...

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

The response to the covid pandemic has varied widely across countries and over time. In this paper, we analyze the determinants of covid restrictions both theoretically and empirically. Consistent with our model’s predictions, we find that the covid protocol is particularly sensitive to the...

We examine how the introduction of COVID-19 vaccinations affects business activity and firm performance in the US. A ten percent increase in vaccination rates results in a 6.6 percent increase in establishment customer visits. Difference-in-Differences analysis shows that the effects are causal....

We investigate the relationship between political attitudes and prosociality in a survey of a representative sample of the U.S. population during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that an experimental measure of prosociality correlates positively with adherence to protective...

This study uses county-level data from across the US to examine whether non-pharmaceutical interventions lead to patterns consistent with lockdown fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic. The tests indicate that as lockdowns persist, any initial positive or negative correlation with future COVID-19...