CHDS affiliates were honored with the Best Paper Award from the journal Risk Analysis at the 2023 Society for Risk Analysis annual meeting. The paper, “The Benefits and Costs of U.S. Employer COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates,” was written by CHDS’s Lisa Robinson and Michael Eber, along with Maddalena Ferranna, Daniel Cadarette, and David Bloom. It explores the direct costs and health-related benefits that would have accrued if the vaccination requirements had been implemented as intended. The results suggest that the associated net benefits depend on the subsequent evolution of the pandemic, information unavailable ex ante to analysts or policymakers. Eber was also elected Treasurer/Secretary of the Society’s Economics and Benefits Analysis Specialty Group.
The conference also featured other work by CHDS affiliates. Robinson and Kari Nadeau co-authored a paper presented by Ernani Choma on the “Health and Climate Benefits of Electric School Bus Adoption in the United States.” That paper considers the costs and climate and health benefits of replacing diesel buses with electric buses in different locales. James Hammitt presented “Fair Innings: An Empirical Test,” exploring how society evaluates mortality risk reductions that accrue to people of different ages. Eber presented “Numeracy and Stated Preference Valuation,” which considers whether the insensitivity of willingness to pay to the quantity of the good being valued reflects cognitive limitations of survey takers or true preferences.
Learn more: Read the article, The Benefits and Costs of U.S. Employer COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates
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