Ho, Lukafor, and Yan-SER2024-Health System Performance

Description

We developed a model to assess the government's disaster response during the COVID-19 pandemic, exploring variations across jurisdictions dominated by dierent political identities in the United States. The model denes an individual's payo as a positive function of his/her income and the government's disaster response. The individual is more prone to wear a mask if the government is more responsive to the disaster during the pandemic, and there can be a lower income loss for the individual during the pandemic when he/she has higher compliance to the government's order of face mask. Utilizing this model, we derive the government's disaster response to be positively correlated with the impact of COVID-19 deaths on masking behavior and negatively correlated with the change of the death toll relative to income. This allows us to evaluate the unobserved disaster response of the government explicitly using regression results. We compare the government's disaster response across jurisdictions dominated by dierent political identities in the United States. The results highlight a more resilient disaster response in Democratic states, translating into superior health system performance compared to their Republican counterparts. These ndings emphasize the crucial role of policies designed to strengthen disaster response, especially in addressing collective action problems such as those posed by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate crises.

Steps to reproduce

The dataset was obtained consists of 3329 counties in the United States between 21 January 2020 and 22 Aug 2021. The data for the number of cases and number of deaths are sourced from New York Times . The number of deaths is the dependent variable in our regressions, while the number of cases is an independent variable. We use subscripts i and t to indicate county i and time t. Let Casesi,t denote the number of COVID-19 cases in county i at time t and Deathsi,t denote the case fatility rate of COVID-19, i.e., the ratio of people who are diagnosed with COVID-19 and end up dying of the disease.

Institutions

• Feng Chia University College of Business

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