Seasonal influenza is a common infectious disease that jeopardizes the health of pregnant women and may harm fetal development. I investigate the impacts of in utero exposure to seasonal influenza over the life course using nearly fifty years of flu season data in the U.S. I exploit state and...

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the United States, we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality. Our estimates suggest that advancing the date...

This paper uses the 1918 influenza pandemic as a natural experiment to examine whether air pollution affects susceptibility to infectious disease. The empirical analysis combines the sharp timing of the pandemic with large cross-city differences in baseline pollution measures based on coal-fired...

COVID infections and deaths in the United States have affected racial groups differentially. Until now, there has been no analysis of the role that structural racism plays in those health outcomes. We use three models of ascending complexity to quantify the state-level impacts of reporting bias,...

Social distancing is important to slow the community spread of infectious disease, but it creates enormous economic and social cost. Thus, it is important to quantify the benefits of different measures. We study the ban of mass gatherings, an intervention with comparably low cost. We exploit...

Burns and Mitchell (1946, 109) found a recession of "exceptional brevity and moderate amplitude." I confirm their judgment by examining a variety of high-frequency data. Industrial output fell sharply but rebounded within months. Retail seemed little affected and there is no evidence of...

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in significant excess mortality among the US population, impacting the future outlays of the US Social Security Administration (SSA) Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (OASDI) program. This study aimed to estimate the net effects of pandemic-induced...

Using county-level data on COVID-19 mortality and infections, along with county-level information on the adoption of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in the United States, we examine how the speed of NPI adoption affected COVID-19 mortality. Our estimates suggest that advancing the date...

Using data from late 19th and early 20th century US prisons, this study estimates the basal metabolic rates and calories for Americans of European descent. Throughout the 19th century, white basal metabolic rates (BMRs) and calories declined across their respective distributions, and much of the...

Disparities in cross-city pandemic severity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic remain poorly understood. This paper uses newly assembled historical data on annual mortality across 438 U.S. cities to explore the determinants of pandemic mortality. We assess the role of three broad factors: i)...