To assess the efficacy of Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on infectious disease containment in Europe, we first use weekly 2015-20 data on the spread of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to compare the 2019-20 season of these diseases with the previous five....

Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for public insurance coverage for prenatal care in most states, despite their children representing a large fraction of births and having U.S. citizenship. In this paper, we examine a policy that expanded Medicaid pregnancy coverage to undocumented...

We use census data at the U.S. county-level to provide causal evidence of health benefits of COVID-19 vaccines. Using variation across age groups within a (county, sample month) pair, we conduct triple-difference tests that control for all variation among counties over time. While vaccination...

How can public policy best deal with infectious disease? In answering this question, scholarship on the optimal control of infectious disease adopts the model of a benevolent social planner who maximizes social welfare. This approach, which treats the social health planner as a unitary “public...

A key question policy makers are interested in is whether public health interventions that can be regarded as best practices could be successful implemented in countries other than the country where the policy was originally implemented. Public health interventions that present best practice...

Although COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, many adults are hesitant or unwilling to use them. Drawing on data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) Corona survey, we examine the correlates of vaccine uptake among Europeans ages 50 and older. We find that...

This study investigates the effectiveness of dynamic norm nudges in promoting second-dose HPV vaccinations among trendsetters-parents who initiated the firstdose HPV vaccine for their daughters between 2017-2020. Utilizing administrative data from Bogota's Secretariat of Health in a field...

The national hepatitis C elimination initiative provides an opportunity to dramatically expand access to hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment and put the US on a path to eliminating hepatitis C. Our objective was to project the health benefits and cost savings of this initiative. A previously...

We consider the effects of "precision" screening policies for cancer guided by algorithms. We first show that complex machine learning models can indeed predict cancer better than simpler models that use established risk factors. We then tackle the evaluation challenge: an algorithm that can...