This paper examines the unintended strategic effects of non-linear incentives in public policies. A system of health care subsidies structured in discrete intervals may lead to strategic behaviour. We provide new evidence on this issue, focusing on a case where the strategic actions are taken by...

There is a strong suggestion from the existing literature that volunteering improves the wellbeing of those who give up their time to help others, but much of it is correlational and not causal. In this paper, we estimate the wellbeing benefits from volunteering for England's National Health...

The UK Universal Credit (UC) welfare reform simplified the benefits system whilst strongly incentivising a return to sustainable employment. Exploiting a staggered roll-out, we estimate the differential effect of entering unemployment under UC versus the former system on mental health. Groups...

Common mental health problems impose significant costs on individuals and societies, yet healthcare systems often overlook them. We provide the first causal evidence on the effectiveness of a pioneering, nationwide mental health service for treating depression and anxiety disorders in England...

People spend a lot of time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals’ utility is equalized. However, in a direct test of this strong notion of equilibrium, we...

This paper analyses the efficiency of the equilibrium allocation in a matching model with two types of workers and jobs. The basic assumption is that high-skill workers can perform both skilled and unskilled jobs, while low-skill workers can only perform unskilled jobs. Our first result shows...

This paper tests three hypotheses concerning intra-household resource allocation in rural China. First, whether increasing the women's bargaining power alters household expenditure patterns. Second, whether households allocate fewer resources to daughters than to sons. Third, whether increasing...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

This paper is an empirical study of slope heterogeneity in job satisfaction. It provides evidence from the generalized ordered probit models that different job characteristics tend to have different distributional impacts on the overall job satisfaction. For instance, standard models tend to...

This paper develops a generalized hedonic model in which an exogenous shock to a single product attribute can affect other attributes, the markets for the product's complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. These factors are shown to be empirically relevant and to cause bias...