Routine childhood vaccinations are among the most cost-effective interventions. In recent years, the broader benefits of vaccines, which include improved cognitive and schooling outcomes, have also been established. This paper evaluates the long-term economic benefits of India's national program...

The existing literature provides evidence that public opinion and attitudes often affect public policy. However, little is known on how public policy might affect public attitudes and norms. I present new evidence on this topic by using age-based health insurance policies in the United States as...

Routine childhood vaccinations are among the most cost-effective interventions. In recent years, the broader benefits of vaccines, which include improved cognitive and schooling outcomes, have also been established. This paper evaluates the long-term economic benefits of India’s national...

Reducing tobacco smoking is a global public health objective. The success of curbing smoking via public health and fiscal policies is ambivalent. In recent years, conventional tobacco control measures have been complemented in some jurisdictions by harm reduction policies. The objective of harm...

This paper examines the political economy of epidemic disease. First, it outlines the incentive and information problems facing policymakers in responding to a new epidemic. Second, it considers the existence of a possible tradeoff between public health and freedom. Informed by a survey of the...

What drives the spread of non-infectious diseases? We study this question in the context of the opioid epidemic. Having many friendship links to counties with high exposure to the opioid epidemic positively correlates with overdose death rates. This correlation is not driven by physical...

In the middle of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the BCG hypothesis, the prevalence and severity of the COVID-19 outbreak seems to be correlated with whether a country has a universal coverage of Bacillus-Calmette-Guerin (BCG), a vaccine for tuberculosis disease (TB), has emerged and attracted the...

In this paper we confront the role the EU traditionally plays in the domain of health with the urgent need for collective action triggered by the corona virus pandemic. In the face of such a crisis, we argue that the joint procurement, stockpiling and allocation of medical countermeasures is a...

Quickly developed therapeutic, prophylactic, and vaccine treatments will be essential to defeat the COVID-19 pandemic. Standard regulatory and development protocols typically yield drug development in 6 to 11 years. However, experimental vaccines and prophylactics against COVID-19 are in...

There is an active debate about how to regulate electronic cigarettes, due to uncertainty about their health effects and whether they are primarily a quit aid or a gateway drug for combustible cigarettes. We model optimal e-cigarette regulation and estimate key parameters. Using tax changes and...