In this study, we use random assignment of vignettes that feature optimistic and pessimistic scenarios with respect to vaccine safety and efficacy on a sample of roughly 1,600 Russians in order to gauge public support for anti-pandemic measures under various scenarios. Negative information on...

This paper examines the causal impact of diagnostic efficiency on the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1-day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and...

This paper uses the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study to investigate the direct and indirect effect of beliefs of others on respondent's own beliefs and on their individual consumer sentiment. In a new online consumer survey with randomized control trials (RCTs) in Thailand and Vietnam, we...

We study individual demand for COVID-19 antibody tests in an incentivized study on a representative sample of the US population. Almost 2,000 participants trade off obtaining an athome test kit against money. At prices close to zero, 80 percent of individuals want the test. However, this broad...

The COVID-19 pandemic brought unprecedented policy responses and a large literature evaluating their impacts. This paper re-examines and add to the evidence on the impact of COVID-19 mobility-restricting policies on mobility indicators. We first find that two-way fixed effects estimates are not...

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic and the measures enforced to combat it have led to a decline in economic activity unprecedented since the Great Depression. Worldwide, millions, and yet millions, of people have lost their jobs-either temporarily or permanently. At first, the COVID- 19...

Elections may take place in precarious environments that even pose health risks. I consider the case of Bavaria, where close to ten million people were asked to vote in the municipal elections on March 15 of 2020, to quantify the toll of elections in a pandemic. Despite declaring a state of...

To fight the spread of COVID-19, many countries implemented unprecedented social distancing policies. This is the first paper that uses an event-study approach to examine the effects of the German social distancing policies on (a) individual behavior and (b) the spread of the epidemic. Combining...

Motivated by the Covid-19 epidemic, we analyse a SIR model of an epidemic but with endogenous social distancing, and calibrate it to UK data to study various hypothetical scenarios of government intervention regarding social distancing. We explicitly take into account that (a) there is...