Telecommunications infrastructure plays a critical role in crisis response, whether in natural disasters or health crises such as the West African Ebola response. For these latter cases, where infrastructure damage is not a problem, the crisis generates increased demands on systems already...

We use individual records of 920,000 burials and 630,000 baptisms to reconstruct the spatial and temporal patterns of birth and death in London from 1560 to 1665, a period dominated by recurrent plague. The plagues of 1563, 1603, 1625, and 1665 appear of roughly equal magnitude, with deaths...

We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature - despite important implications for modern-day...

We study the impact of the 1918 influenza pandemic on economic performance in Sweden. The pandemic was one of the severest and deadliest pandemics in human history, but it has hitherto received only scant attention in the economic literature - despite important implications for modern-day...

We analyse the global economic effects of two influenza pandemics that represent extremes along the virulence-infectiousness continuum of possible pandemics: a high virulence-low infectiousness event and a low virulence-high infectiousness event. We do this by applying results from a...

This paper studies how media and democracy influence government action taken before and after a natural disaster. The key elements in this relationship are the media's role as the provider of information to voters about government action and the quality of democracy that pertains to how relevant...

This paper studies the spread of the Black Death as a proxy for the ow of medieval trade between 1346 and 1351. The Black Death struck most areas of Europe and the wider Mediterranean. Based on a modified version of the gravity model, we estimate the speed (in kilometers per day) of transmission...

This paper uses a unique household data set collected in Vietnam to empirically test the necessary conditions for an extended version of the consumption risk-sharing hypothesis. The test explicitly incorporates self-production and uses natural disasters such as avian influenza, droughts, and...

We simulate the effects of a hypothetical H1N1 epidemic in the U.S. using a quarterly CGE model. Quarterly periodicity allows us to capture the short-run nature of an epidemic. We find potentially severe economic effects in the peak quarter. Averaged over the epidemic year the effects are...

Early 2009 saw the emergence of an H1N1 influenza epidemic in North America that spread to eventually become a global pandemic. Previous work has suggested that pandemics can have large macroeconomic effects on highly affected regions; here we estimate what those effects might be for Australia....

Ce cahier est une contribution au retour d'expérience qu'il faudrait mener sur la pandémie grippale 2009. Il tente de cerner le terrain sur lequel s'est déroulé la crise, et qui a nourri la crise en profondeur. Il fournit aussi, en seconde partie, le tableau de bord de réflexion et de...