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

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.