Why nanny statism matters: evidence from the first wave of COVID-19.

Background: A nanny state imposes restrictions on people's liberty and freedom of action in order to advance their interest and welfare. The extent to which this is desirable, or even ethically acceptable, is debated in the literature. This paper formulates and tests the following hypothesis: the more of a nanny a state has been in the past, the more likely it is that the incumbent government will respond to a new, unknown threat with interventions of a paternalist nature, irrespective of other factors that might contribute to shaping government's response.

Personality, gender, and age resilience to the mental health effects of COVID-19.

Rationale: Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on different population cohorts and which personality traits affected individual's coping responses can help identify strategies to promote self-directed behaviours, thereby enhancing and maintaining individual's mental well-being.

Objective: Using longitudinal data for the UK, we examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals' mental well-being, focusing on age, gender, and personality traits as possible modifiers.

Methods: We explore the longitudinal nature of the data using individual fixed effects models, which implicitly control for unobserved time-invariant individual-level characteristics.

Addressing the unemployment-mortality conundrum: non-linearity is the answer.

The effect of unemployment on mortality is the object of a lively literature. However, this literature is characterized by sharply conflicting results. We revisit this issue and suggest that the relationship might be non-linear.

Identifying covariates of population health using extreme bound analysis.

Background: The literature is full of lively discussion on the determinants of population health outcomes. However, different papers focus on small and different sets of variables according to their research agenda. Because many of these variables are measures of different aspects of development and are thus correlated, the results for one variable can be sensitive to the inclusion/exclusion of others.

Does donor assistance for HIV respond to media pressure?

HIV/AIDS is a heavily mediatised disease. In this article, we test whether media attention is affecting donors' disbursement of aid for HIV to African countries. We use information available on the number of articles and press documents on HIV issues and other health concerns published in donor countries to construct a proxy of media coverage.

Has HIV/AIDS displaced other health funding priorities? Evidence from a new dataset of development aid for health.

In recent times there has been a sense that HIV/AIDS control has been attracting a significantly larger portion of donor health funding to the extent that it crowds out funding for other health concerns. Although there is no doubt that HIV/AIDS has absorbed a large share of development assistance for health (DAH), whether HIV/AIDS is actually diverting funding away from other health concerns has yet to be analyzed fully. To fill this vacuum, this study aims to test if a higher level of HIV/AIDS funding is related to a displacement in funding for other health concerns, and if yes, to quantify the magnitude of the displacement effect.