Behaviorally informed digital campaigns and their association with social media engagement and COVID-19 vaccine uptake in Belize.

Background: Increasing vaccination coverage was key to curbing the COVID-19 pandemic globally. However, lack of trust in the vaccine and fear of side effects in regions like the Caribbean resulted in a low uptake despite enough vaccine supply.

Methods: We conducted two correlational analyses and one experiment between five sequential behaviorally informed Facebook campaigns, social media performance outcomes, and district-level vaccination data.

Better than my neighbor? Testing for overconfidence in COVID-19 preventive behaviors in Latin America.

Background: Procrastination and lack of attention may often hinder the implementation of preemptive actions necessary to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 like washing hands, covering nose and mouth with a mask, and keeping social distance. It is in such "easy" tasks that people (mistakenly) believe that they are better than others. In this paper we test for overconfidence bias in COVID-19 preventive behaviors in Latin America.

Time Use of Youth during a Pandemic: Evidence from Mexico.

Studying how the pandemic affects the education and work of adolescents is a critical question with long lasting implications for well-being of the next generation, particularly in the developing world. The Covid-19 pandemic by mid-March 2020 had led to the closing of most educational institutions in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the region has been one of the worst hit by the pandemic (Sanmarchi et al. 2021).