Taking the case of rural South India, we explore the universality of the Big Five personality traits and their stability over time. We then investigate the effects of two exogenous shocks on trait stability: the demonetisation of November 2016 and the second COVID-19 lockdown. We use an original...

We provide new evidence that short-run temperature shocks affect unemployment dynamics. Linking daily weather data with three decades of Current Population Survey microdata, we show that cold, but not hot, temperatures significantly increase unemployment risk. This effect is concentrated in...

Vlassopoulos et al. (2024) find that after providing two hours of telephone counseling over three months, a sample of Bangladeshi women saw significant reductions in stress and depression after ten months. We find three anomalies. First, estimates are almost entirely driven by reverse-scored...

Siddique et al. (2024a) report massive effects of a mobile phone-based health awareness campaign in a randomized field experiment conducted in rural Bangladesh and India during the COVID-19 pandemic. Both awareness and compliance with preventive COVID-19 measures were higher when the information...

We specify the domain in the income distribution that includes the people to whom income transfers will not increase inequality in that income distribution. Inspired by Sen's (1973, 1997) characterization of the Gini coefficient as a ratio between a measure of aggregate income-based "depression"...

Fueling debates about the "quality" of immigrants from economically developing countries, empirical studies based on a well-respected methodology conclude that post-1965 immigrant men have low initial earnings and sluggish earnings growth. This methodology is based on flawed assumptions (Duleep,...

Lacking lifetime income data, most intergenerational mobility estimates are subject to lifecycle bias. Using long income series from Sweden and the US, we illustrate that standard correction methods struggle to account for one important property of income processes: children from affluent...

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children---through duration expansions to the kindergarten day---to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day kindergarten variation across place and time...

This paper provides the first causal evaluation of the political impact of asylum seekers in the UK. Although dispersed across areas on a no-choice basis, political bargaining between central and local governments introduces potential endogeneity in their allocation. We address this with a novel...

This paper documents a robust link between COVID-19 lockdowns and the uptake and persistence of working from home (WFH) practices. Exploiting rich longitudinal data, we use a difference-in-differences strategy to compare office workers in three heavily locked-down Australian states to similar...