Mental health and poverty are strongly interlinked. There is a gap in the literature on the effects of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. We aim to fill this gap by studying the effect of an exogenous income shock generated by the Child Support Grant, South Africa's largest...

We study the effect of the introduction in 2015 of UK Shared Parental Leave policy on the up-take and the length of leave taken by fathers. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study and Regression Discontinuity in Time, we show that the reform has not affected uptake or length of parental leave...

The Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) is a Pay-for-Performance scheme introduced in England in 2004 to reward primary care providers. This incentive scheme provides financial incentives that reward the overall performance of a practice, not individual effort. Consequently, an important...

This paper uses household data to test whether microfinance institutions created by the Malawian government in the mid-1990s under its Poverty Alleviation Programme crowded out access to informal loans. As in several recent studies, the paper adopts policy evaluation techniques to identify a...

This study explores people's risk attitudes after having suffered large real-world losses following a natural disaster. Using the margins of the 2011 Australian floods (Brisbane) as a natural experimental setting, we find that homeowners who were victims of the floods and face large losses in...

A pandemic is not only a biological event and a public health disaster, but it also generates impacts that are worth understanding from a societal, historical, and cultural perspective.In this contribution, we argue that as the disease spreads, we are able to harness a valuable key resource,...

The COVID-19 pandemic and the policy measures to control its spread – lockdowns, physical distancing, and social isolation – has coincided with the deterioration of people's mental well-being. We use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS) to document how this phenomenon is...

Behavioural responses to pandemics are less shaped by actual mortality or hospitalization risks than they are by risk attitudes. We explore human mobility patterns as a measure of behavioural responses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our results indicate a strong negative relationship between...

Although science has been an incredibly powerful and revolutionary force, it is not clear whether science is suited to performance under pressure; generally, science achieves best in its usual comfort zone of patience, caution, and slowness. But if science is organized knowledge and acts as a...

The current COVID-19 pandemic is a global exogenous shock, impacting individuals' decision making and behaviour allowing researchers to test theories of personality by exploring how traits, in conjunction with individual and societal differences affect compliance and cooperation. Study 1 used...