Are COVID-19 fatalities large when a federal government does not enforce containment policies and instead allow states to implement their own policies? We answer this question by developing a stochastic extension of a SIRD epidemiological model for a country composed of multiple states. Our model allows for interstate mobility. We consider three policies: mask mandates, stay-at-home orders, and interstate travel bans. We fit our model to daily U.S. state-level COVID-19 death counts and exploit our estimates to produce various policy counterfactuals. While the restrictions imposed by some states inhibited a significant number of virus deaths, we find that more than two-thirds of U.S. COVID-19 deaths could have been prevented by late November 2020 had the federal government enforced federal mandates as early as some of the earliest states did. Our results quantify the benefits of early actions by a federal government for the containment of a pandemic.

ABSTRACT. We study the debt-stabilizing properties of indexing debt to GDP using a consumptionbased macro-finance model. To this end, we derive quasi-analytical pricing formulas for any type of bond/equity by exploiting the discretization of the state-space, making large-scale simulations tractable. We find that GDP-linked security prices would embed time-varying risk premiums of about 40 basis points. For a fixed budget surplus, issuing GDP-linked securities does not imply more beneficial debt-to-GDP ratios in the long-run, while the debt-stabilizing budget surplus is more predictable at the expense of being higher. Our findings call into question the view that such securities tame debt.