Related papers: Lockdown effects in US states: an artificial count…
Following the highly restrictive measures adopted by many countries for combating the current pandemic, the number of individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 and the associated number of deaths is steadily decreasing. This fact, together with…
The ongoing pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019-2020 (COVID-19) is caused by Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). This pathogenic virus is able to spread asymptotically during its incubation stage through a…
This paper proposes a novel approach for constructing effective personalized policies when the observed data lacks counter-factual information, is biased and possesses many features. The approach is applicable in a wide variety of settings…
Given limited supply of approved vaccines and constrained medical resources, design of a vaccination strategy to control a pandemic is an economic problem. We use time-series and panel methods with real-world country-level data to estimate…
We use the Newcomb-Benford law to test if countries have manipulated reported data during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that democratic countries, countries with the higher gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, higher healthcare…
Despite the wide availability of COVID-19 vaccines in the United States and their effectiveness in reducing hospitalizations and mortality during the pandemic, a majority of Americans chose not to be vaccinated during 2021. Recent work…
We assess the impact of COVID-19 response measures implemented in Germany and Switzerland on cumulative COVID-19-related hospitalization and death rates. Our analysis exploits the fact that the epidemic was more advanced in some regions…
Social distancing, often in the form of lockdown, has been adopted by many countries as a way to contrast the spreading of COVID-19. We discuss the temporal aspects of social distancing in contrasting an epidemic diffusion. We argue that a…
We study the problem of a policymaker who aims at taming the spread of an epidemic while minimizing its associated social costs. The main feature of our model lies in the fact that the disease's transmission rate is a diffusive stochastic…
This paper combines a canonical epidemiology model of disease dynamics with government policy of lockdown and testing, and agents' decision to social distance in order to avoid getting infected. The model is calibrated with data on deaths…
The diffusion of COVID19 is calling governments and public health authorities to interventions that limit new infections and contain the expected number of critical cases and deaths. Most of these measures rely on the compliance of people,…
Estimating causal effects on time-to-event outcomes from observational data is particularly challenging due to censoring, limited sample sizes, and non-random treatment assignment. The need for answering such "when-if" questions--how the…
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is an unprecedented global public health challenge. In the United States (US), state governments have implemented various non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), such as physical distance…
The use of machine learning systems to support decision making in healthcare raises questions as to what extent these systems may introduce or exacerbate disparities in care for historically underrepresented and mistreated groups, due to…
At a national-level, we sought to investigate the effect of public masking mandates on COVID-19 in Fall 2020. Specifically, we aimed to evaluate how the relative growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths would have differed if all states had…
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused major disturbance to human life. An important reason behind the widespread social anxiety is the huge uncertainty about the pandemic. A fundamental uncertainty is how many or what percentage of people have…
Counterfactual prediction is about predicting outcome of the unobserved situation from the data. For example, given patient is on drug A, what would be the outcome if she switch to drug B. Most of existing works focus on modeling…
Following recent shootings in the USA, a debate has erupted, one side favoring stricter gun control, the other promoting protection through more weapons. We provide a scientific foundation to inform this debate, based on mathematical,…
Contact tracing and quarantine programs have been one of the leading Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions against COVID-19. Some governments have relied on mandatory programs, whereas others embrace a voluntary approach. However, there is…
Many macroeconomic policy questions may be assessed in a case study framework, where the time series of a treated unit is compared to a counterfactual constructed from a large pool of control units. I provide a general framework for this…