This paper examines the effect of temperature on emergency department (ED) visits using administrative data covering 50% of the Hungarian population and 3.52 million ED visits from 2009 to 2017. The results show that ED visit rates increase when average temperatures exceed 10°C, primarily...

This paper reviews the history of the practice of quarantines, rediscovering the 19th century 'Sanitarian' movement in Britain that sprang from a recognition that quarantines had failed to stop the spread of diseases and were not cost-effective. To our knowledge, the key figure among the...

The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the crucial role of Internet access in pandemic prevention and response. Internet access has facilitated the rapid dissemination of vital information, provided telemedicine services, and enabled remote work and education. This study...

This paper investigates the link between dishonesty and the spread of COVID- 19 infections. In an online experiment and panel survey, 2,723 Germans completed an incentivized coin-tossing task in March 2020 and reported their infection status in four subsequent survey waves up until December...

Background Due to population aging, healthcare expenditure is projected to increase substantially in developed countries like Spain. However, prior research indicates that health status, not merely age, is a key driver of healthcare costs. This study analyzed data from over 1.25 million...

In some NUTS 2 (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) regions of Europe, the COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an increase in mortality by several dozen percent and only a few percent in others. Based on the data on 189 regions from 19 European countries, we identified factors...

Using nationally representative data from India, we document the first survey-based evidence of the unintended consequences of lockdown on neonatal mortality in a developing country. Event-study shows neonatal mortality significantly increased during the first nationwide lockdown and became...

SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus, spread across Germany within just a short period of time. Seroepidemiological studies are able to estimate the proportion of the population with antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 infection (seroprevalence) as well as the level of undetected infections, which are not...

This study investigates the scope of morbidity and mortality from SARS-COV2 virus at a country-wide level based on three central risk factors: population density, median age, and per capita hospital beds. Given that the relative weight following a change in equal units of measurement has not...

This article has been retracted: please see Elsevier Policy on Article Withdrawal (https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/article-withdrawal). This article has been retracted at the request of Editor. The Editor of Operations Research Perspectives has retracted the publication based on evidence...

Does the long-term economic stress of occupational decline cause health problems, or even death? This paper explores this question using Swedish administrative data, and a measure of occupational decline obtained from detailed US data on employment changes over almost 30 years. I investigate...

More than 100 million people have been infected and 2.5 million people have died of COVID-19 globally as of February 2021. Mass antigen testing could help to mitigate the pandemic and allow the economy to re-open. We investigate the effects of mass antigen testing on the pandemic, using data...

This paper explores the interplay between two dimensions of trust i.e., political and interpersonal trust, and the spread of COVID-19 in European regions. To undertake our analysis we combine sub-national (NUTS 1 regions) data for trust from ten consecutive rounds of the European Social Survey...

Motivated by the complicated control issues of COVID-19, this article aims at investigating the optimal control of an epidemic of a Susceptible-Infective-Removed-Susceptible (SIRS) infection, where social distancing is the only control action in a first stage, whereas a combination of social...

This study investigates the effects of social distancing measures on various types of social mobility, using country- and day-fixed effects on a panel of daily data comprising 29 European countries. Although social distancing measures proved to be significant for all types of mobility in the...

How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their...

In this paper we estimate the importance of local labour structure in the spread of COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic. We build a unique data set across 6,700 neighbourhoods in England that allows us to distinguish between people living (residents) and people working (workers) in a...

How do people form beliefs about novel risks, with which they have little or no experience? A 2020 US survey of beliefs about the lethality of Covid reveals that the elderly underestimate, and the young overestimate, their own risks, and that people with more health adversities are more...

High-speed railways (HSRs) greatly decrease transportation costs and facilitate the movement of goods, services, and passengers across cities. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, however, HSRs may contribute to the cross-regional spread of the new coronavirus. This paper evaluates the role...

I investigate the interplay between health state transitions and longevity risk on retirees’ optimal decision to purchase long-term care (LTC) insurance. By incorporating a life-cycle model framework, I examine how increased longevity in alternative morbidity scenarios (i.e., morbidity...

We study the link between illness severity and the use of public health care services by the privately insured under a public health system. Our theoretical model shows that this relationship will depend on the prioritization established by the public health authorities, the cost of waiting and...

Economists use micro-based and macro-based approaches to assess the macroeconomic return to population health. The macro-based approach tends to yield estimates that are either negative and close to zero or positive and an order of magnitude larger than the range of estimates derived from the...

While many articles have analyzed the effectiveness of the policies that aimed to limit the spread of COVID-19, very little research work has examined the determinants that drove these policies. Therefore, we proposed to study the determinants that led government authorities to implement more or...

This paper builds a government policy choice model in a general equilibrium setting in which households' health status responds to a stricter policy on the pandemic. By assuming an exogenous policy decision date, the model implies the government should maintain the current policy until the...