An innovation (e.g., new product or idea) spreads like a virus, transmitted by those who have previously adopted it. Agents update their beliefs about innovation quality based on private signals and when they hear about the innovation. We characterize equilibrium adoption dynamics and the...

An innovation (e.g., new product or idea) spreads like a virus, transmitted by those who have previously adopted it. Agents update their beliefs about innovation quality based on private signals and when they hear about the innovation. We characterize equilibrium adoption dynamics and the...

Against the backdrop of Covid-19, we study the effectiveness of public policies typically employed to fight an epidemic. We extend the compartmental SIR model to explore the trade-offs which govern individual behavior. Our stylized model allows for a closed form analysis of vaccination and...

This article develops a detailed epidemiological multi-factor model, the K-susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (K-SEIR) model, and several simpler sub-models as its building blocks. The general model enables us to account for all the relevant COVID-19 features, its disparate impact on different...

This paper provides estimates of COVID-19 effective reproduction numbers and explains their evolution for selected European countries since the start of the pandemic taking account of changes in voluntary and government mandated social distancing, incentives to comply, vaccination and the...

A rich economic literature has examined the human capital impacts of disease-eliminating health interventions, such as the rollout of new vaccines. This literature is based on reduced-form approaches which exploit proxies for disease burden, such as mortality, instead of actual infection counts,...

This paper provides estimates of COVID-19 effective reproduction numbers and explains their evolution for selected European countries since the start of the pandemic taking account of changes in voluntary and government mandated social distancing, incentives to comply, vaccination and the...

This article develops a detailed epidemiological multi-factor model, the K-susceptible-exposed-infected-removed (K-SEIR) model, and several simpler sub-models as its building blocks. The general model enables us to account for all the relevant COVID-19 features, its disparate impact on different...

This paper reviews the literature on incorporating behavioural elements into epidemiological models of pandemics. While modelling behaviour by forward-looking rational agents can provide some insight into the time paths of pandemics, the non-stationary nature of Susceptible-Infected-Removed...

This paper reviews the literature on incorporating behavioural elements into epidemiological models of pandemics. While modelling behaviour by forward-looking rational agents can provide some insight into the time paths of pandemics, the non-stationary nature of Susceptible-Infected-Removed...

Abstract In this paper an analysis of the first diffusion of the Covid-19 outbreak occurred in late February 2020 in Northern Italy is presented. In order to study the time evolution of the epidemic it was decided to analyze in particular as the most relevant variable the number of hospitalized...

The implementation of a lockdown to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a strong economic and political debate in several countries. This makes it crucial to shed light on the actual benefits of such kind of policy. To this purpose, we focus on the Swiss lockdown during the...

Various forms of contact restriction have been adopted in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Only recently, rapid testing appeared as a new policy instrument. If sufficiently effective, it may serve as a substitute for contact restrictions. Against this background we evaluate the effects of a...

This paper aims to provide reliable estimates for the COVID-19 contact rate of a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered (SIR) model, From observable data on confirmed, recovered, and deceased cases, a noisy measurement for the contact rate can be constructed, To filter out measurement errors and...

This study investigates the contagious nature of tax avoidance by examining how narratives affect tax avoiding behavior. We adapt the idea of narrative economics indicating that individuals' actions are stimulated by stories that spread within a society. We employ two types of infection models...

How to allocate vaccines over heterogeneous individuals is one of the important policy decisions in pandemic times. This paper develops a procedure to estimate an individualized vaccine allocation policy under limited supply, exploiting social network data containing individual demographic...