We analyze the role played by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in alleviating or exacerbating inequality across racial and ethnic groups in food expenditures and in the resources needed to meet basic food needs (the "food resource gap"). To do this, we propose a simple...

As of 2021, 16 U.S. States and the District of Columbia have implemented laws allowing undocumented migrants to acquire a driver's license. In this paper, I hypothesize that lower barriers to work caused by the ability to obtain driving licenses can affect undocumented migrants' fertility...

We estimate the impacts of mandated political reservation for minorities on household credit access and borrowing behavior. To identify causal effects, we exploit the exogenous state-time variation in the allocation of constituencies (electoral districts) to the two reserved minority groups in...

This paper studies whether affirmative action policies towards the outsider group may foster a backlash by the insider one. We exploit the unique historical context provided by the legacy of apartheid in democratic South Africa. We found that the completion of the affirmative action legislation...

We estimate the impact of pension enrollment on mental well-being using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest existing pension program in the world. Since its launch in 2009, more than 400 million Chinese have enrolled in the NRPS. We first describe plausible pathways through...

In a world increasingly globalized, multiple language skills can create more employment opportunities. Several countries include language training programs in active labor market programs for the unemployed. We analyze the effects of a language training program on the re-employment probability...

This paper studies two experiments of early childhood development programs in The Gambia: one increasing access to services, and another improving service quality. In the first experiment, new community-based early childhood development (ECD) centers were introduced to randomly chosen villages...

The empirical evidence on the inter-generational effects of maternal health interventions is inconclusive, particularly the impact on cognitive ability of children. In this paper, we study one such popular policy from India, viz, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) which is a agship health and safe...

Recent studies have proposed causal machine learning (CML) methods to estimate conditional average treatment effects (CATEs). In this study, I investigate whether CML methods add value compared to conventional CATE estimators by re-evaluating Connecticut's Jobs First welfare experiment. This...

An issue of interest in the literature that explores the drivers of inequality is the distributional bearing of tax and transfer policy, where an important theme concerns changes in the relative treatment of alternative population subgroups. We develop an empirical approach for quantifying the...