In this article we describe how well-being changed during 2020 in ten countries, namely Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, South Africa, and Spain. Our measure of well-being is the Gross National Happiness (GNH), a country-level index built...

More democratic countries are often expected to fail at providing a fast, strong, and effective response when facing a crisis such as COVID-19. This could result in higher infections and more negative health effects, but hard evidence to prove this claim is missing for the new disease. Studying...

Better understanding whether and how communities respond to government decisions is crucial for policy makers and health offcials in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we document the socioeconomic determinants of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders' compliance in the U.S. Using cell...

This paper investigates the associations between institution trust and public response to the COVID-19 outbreak. An Internet-based, cross-sectional survey was administered on January 29, 2020 to the epicenter Hubei province, China. A total of 4,393 adults who ≥18 years of age and residing or...

A better understanding of community response to government decisions is crucial for policy makers and health officials during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this study, we document the determinants of implementation and compliance with stay-at-home orders in the U.S., focusing on trust and social...

This paper investigates the relative importance of confidence in public institutions to explain cross-country differences in the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. We extend the related literature by employing regression and machine learning methods to identify the most critical predictors of...

We study the relationship between trust and vaccination. We show theoretically that vaccination rates are higher in countries with more transparent and accountable governments. The mechanism that generates this result is the lower probability of a transparent and accountable government to...

This research explores the complex dynamics of panic buying during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a comprehensive cross-sectional dataset from an online survey conducted in Turkiye, I employ the control ¨ function approach to examine the psychological and societal effects of the pandemic. The...

Identifying structural breaks in the dynamics of COVID-19 contagion is crucial to promptly assess policies and evaluate the effectiveness of lockdown measures. However, official data record infections after a critical and unpredictable delay. Moreover, people react to the health risks of the...

Feedback control-based mitigation strategies for COVID-19 are threatened by the time span occurring before an infection is detected in official data. Such a delay also depends on behavioral, technological and procedural issues other than the incubation period. We provide a machine learning...