While standard demand factors perform well in predicting historical trade patterns, they fail conspicuously in 2020, when pandemic-specific factors played a key role above and beyond demand. Prediction errors from a multilateral import demand model in 2020 vary systematically with the health...

Using high-frequency proxies for economic activity over a large sample of countries, we show that the economic crisis during the first seven months of the COVID-19 pandemic was only partly due to government lockdowns. Economic activity also contracted because of voluntary social distancing in...

We develop an integrated epidemiological-macroeconomic model to analyze the interplay between the COVID-19 outbreak and economic activity, as a tool for capacity building purposes. We illustrate a workhorse framework that combines a rich epidemiological model with an economic block to shed light...

Voluntary and government-mandated lockdowns in response to COVID-19 have caused causing drastic reductions in economic activity around the world. We present a parsimonious two-country-SIR model with some degree of substitutability between home and foreign goods, and show that trading partners'...

The COVID-19 crisis has had a tremendous economic impact for all countries. Yet, assessing the full impact of the crisis has been frequently hampered by the delayed publication of official GDP statistics in several emerging market and developing economies. This paper outlines a machine-learning...

Based on a survey of about 2,500 US resident adults, we show that people who have experienced serious illness or job loss caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, or who personally know someone who has, favor a temporary progressive levy or structural progressive tax reform to a greater extent than...

The paper uses firm-level data to assess the financial health of the Vietnamese non-financial corporate sector on the eve of pandemic. Our analysis finds that smaller domestic firms were particularly vulnerable even by regional comparison. A sensitivity analysis suggests that the COVID-19 shock...