Lorraine Frisina Doetter and her co-authors Benedikt Preuß and Pasquale G. Frisina have won the 2022 Patrick J. Welch Award of the Association for Social Economics for their paper The Intersections of Pandemic, Public Policy and Social Inequality in the United States. The author team explored the public policy response in the first year of the pandemic as well as the Covid-19 specific vulnerability of the three main ethnic population groups in the United States (White, Black, Hispanic).

The Patrick J. Welch Award for the best paper published in the Forum for Social Economics was established by the Association for Social Economics’ Executive Council in 2012 and named for Patrick J. Welch, editor of the journal from 1995 to 2006. The award was presented at the Association's Presidential Breakfast on January 7, 2023.

The paper’s research question was if public policy measures in 2020 to control the spread of the virus in the US have led to improved mortality rates for Blacks, Hispanics and Whites equally. The authors’ findings point to a highly divergent impact of public policy, i.e., strong racial/ethnic biases.

Read the full paper online (open access):
Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Benedikt Preuß & Pasquale G. Frisina (2022): The Intersections of Pandemic, Public Policy and Social Inequality in the United States, Forum for Social Economics, 51:2, 220-234.
DOI: 10.1080/07360932.2021.1967182