Women are the primary recipients of many welfare programs around the world. Despite frequent claims that targeting women induces beneficial consumption shifting and gender equality, the empirical evidence on the effect of targeting is relatively scarce. We report on a highly powered intervention...

Do better material conditions improve well-being and mental health? Or does any positive relationship merely reflect that psychological well-being promotes economic success? We supply new responses to these questions by comparing winners and losers from a large Ethiopian housing lottery in a...

In a global sample of around 310,000 couples, men whose firstborn child is a girl (instead of a boy) are 10 percent less likely to strangle their partner each year. The probability that they kick, punch, or slap her also decreases by about 4 percent. These are causal effects under the assumption...

An influential literature has shown that women are less willing to compete than men, and the gender gap in competition may contribute to explaining gender differences in educational choices and labor market outcomes. This study reports from a large-scale randomized controlled trial of a women...

We provide causal evidence of how an increase in wealth affects support for redistribution and beliefs about the causes of poverty. Exploiting the variation in wealth created by an Ethiopian housing lottery, we show that general attitudes toward redistribution and inequality acceptance are...