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Working Paper
Optimal Epidemic Control in Equilibrium with Imperfect Testing and Enforcement
We analyze equilibrium behavior and optimal policy within a Susceptible-Infected-Recovered epidemic model augmented with potentially undiagnosed agents who infer their health status and a social planner with imperfect enforcement of social distancing. We define and prove the existence of a perfect Bayesian Markov competitive equilibrium and contrast it with the efficient allocation subject to the same informational constraints. We identify two externalities, static (individual actions affect current risk of infection) and dynamic (individual actions affect future disease prevalence), and ...
Working Paper
Quarantine, Contact Tracing, and Testing: Implications of an Augmented SEIR Model
I incorporate quarantine, contact tracing, and random testing in the basic SEIR model of infectious disease diffusion. A version of the model that is calibrated to known characteristics of the spread of COVID-19 is used to estimate the transmission rate of COVID-19 in the United States in 2020. The transmission rate is then decomposed into a part that reflects observable changes in employment and social contacts and a residual component that reflects disease properties and all other factors that affect the spread of the disease. I then construct counterfactuals for an alternative ...