Government should be able to require consumer product makers and sellers to post government public health messages on or near the relevant product packages as a regulatory condition imposed on enterprises, compliance with which would be required in order to be permitted to sell those products....

Objectives. To determine the impact of the national health strategy for England, 'Health of the Nation' (HOTN) at the local level; the mechanisms by which this was achieved; and to provide lessons for the new strategy, 'Saving lives: our healthier nation'. Design. Case studies. Semi-structured...

Did Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act affect the course of the COVID-19 pandemic? We answer this question using a regression discontinuity design for counties near the borders of states that expanded Medicaid with states that did not. Relevant covariates change continuously across...

Vaccines exert a positive externality, reducing spread of disease from the consumer to others, providing a rationale for subsidies. We study how optimal subsidies vary with disease characteristics by integrating a standard epidemiological model into a vaccine market with rational economic...

To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear and anxiety that threaten social order and political stability. We study how policy response to an infectious disease affects mass fear using data from a...

Recent legislations directed Medicare to revamp its decades-old system for reimbursing dialysis treatments, with focus on the risk adjustment of payments and on the transition toward a pay-for-compliance system. To design an optimal payment system that incorporates these features, we develop an...

Nursing homes have been caught in the crosshairs of the coronavirus pandemic. As of early May 2020, Covid-19 had claimed the lives of more than 28,000 nursing home residents and staff in the United States. But U.S. nursing homes were unstable even before Covid-19 hit. The tragedy unfolding in...

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic dramatically shifted American public life, and with it patterns of gun violence. In this paper, we show that states’ efforts to contain COVID-19 infections through statewide emergency declarations, Stay at Home orders, and phased reopening have significantly...

The Trump Administration has exposed both the durability and vulnerability of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s insurance reforms. One of the Administration’s first strikes at “Obamacare” was to discontinue federal government payment of cost-sharing reductions, which...

Early non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) significantly reduced the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, there are vast differences in how quickly governments implemented NPIs. In this paper, we analyze the role of public attention, measured as the share of daily Google searches in a...