The economics of epidemics: introduction to the special issue, part two

The spring of 2020 will long be remembered for the loss of life and widespread economic disruption due to Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Yet something constructive came out of those awful months: Many economists discovered infectious-disease epidemiology. The volume of new work was so great that Covid Economics, an online journal of the Centre for Economic Policy Research launched in April 2020, published 12 issues in May alone. Avinash Dixit, a renowned economic theorist, wittily remarked, “If any pandemic spread faster than Covid-19, it is that of research about Covid-19” (Dixit 2020).1 As the pandemic raged, hundreds of economists from labor, finance, market design, and other sub-fields put aside what they were doing and devoted themselves to contributing to our understanding of the economics of epidemics. What resulted was a blossoming of economic epidemiology, building off the foundations that had been laid over the previous three decades.2 However, because many of the scholars doing this work were established leaders in other fields and eager to shift focus back to their main research interests once the pandemic emergency waned, many outstanding contributions were never published. We launched this Special Issue as a means to collect and elevate some of the best of this unpublished work, and to promote the continued creative growth of the field of economic epidemiology