Public Policy

They Blinded Us From Science - Misperceptions of COVID19 Risk

August, 2020

Abstract

The first round of our Franklin Templeton–Gallup Economics of Recovery Study has already yielded three powerful and surprising insights:

1. Americans still misperceive the risks of death from COVID-19 for different age cohorts— to a shocking extent;

2. The misperception is greater for those who identify as Democrats, and for those who rely more on social media for information; partisanship and misinformation, to misquote Thomas Dolby, are blinding us from science; and

The Autonomous Mind: The Right to Freedom of Thought in the Twenty-First Century

September, 2019

To lose freedom of thought (FoT) is to lose our dignity, our democracy and our very selves. Accordingly, the right to FoT receives absolute protection under international human rights law. However, this foundational right has been neither significantly developed nor often utilized. The contours of this right urgently need to be defined due to twenty-first century threats to FoT posed by new technologies. As such, this paper draws on law and psychology to consider what the right to FoT should be in the twenty-first century.

Did Lockdown Work? An Economist’s Cross-Country Comparison

August, 2020

Abstract

I explore the association between the severity of lockdown policies in the first half of 2020 and mortality rates. Using two indices from the Blavatnik Centre’s Covid 19 policy measures and comparing weekly mortality rates from 24 European countries in the first halves of 2017-2020, and addressing policy endogeneity in two different ways, I find no clear association between lockdown policies and mortality development.

Global Assessment of the Relationship between Government Response Measures and COVID19 Deaths

July, 2020

Abstract

Objective: To provide an early global assessment of the impact of government stringency measures on the rate of growth in deaths from COVID-19. We hypothesized that the overall stringency of a government's interventions and the speed of implementation would affect the growth and level of deaths related to COVID-19 in that country.

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