A large literature has explored the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on intimate partner violence (IPV) worldwide. However, few studies provide clear evidence on the mechanisms through which the pandemic exacerbated violence, and many rely on hotline or police report data, which confounds changes in reporting behavior. Our paper addresses this issue by conducting a large nationwide survey in Peru, a country that has been hit particularly hard by COVID-19. We isolate pandemic-related economic shocks based on geographic variation in the industry composition of employment shocks and find a sizable and sustained increase in IPV, which aligns with the patterns found in helpline calls. Households most likely to lose a job experienced the largest increases in IPV. These patterns indicate that economic losses were an integral causal mechanism through which COVID-19 increased IPV.

We study the effects of an experimental transition to account deposits from cash on rural women’s receipt of payments and their monetary and time costs of obtaining benefits. The context for our experiment is the Prospera program from Mexico, the pioneering conditional cash transfer program. We find that beneficiaries transitioned to receive deposits incur higher costs of collecting transfers (both time and money) and report feeling significantly less safe when collecting transfers. Furthermore, they are significantly less likely to report receiving their complete transfer, potentially due to bank commissions.

In this study, we examine whether a positive income shock, measured by lottery wins, affects labor supply and the employment of individuals in Vietnam using Vietnam Living Standard Surveys 1993 and 1998. We do not find significant effects of lottery wins on the probability of working or on working hours. However, we find that lottery wins tend to be invested in productive assets and nonfarm household businesses. As a result, individuals from lottery-winning households tend to quit their wage-earning jobs and move to nonfarm self-employment. A 1% increase in lottery winnings results in a 0.22% increase in nonfarm income and a 0.056% increase in per capita income (excluding lottery winnings).

We estimate the effect of state judiciary presence on rent extraction in Brazilian local governments. Rents are measured as irregularities related to waste or corruption uncovered by auditors. We exploit an informal institutional rule that assigns prosecutors and judges to the most populous among contiguous counties that form a judicial district. By comparing municipalities that are the most populous in their judicial districts with municipalities from other judicial districts in the same state that have identical population size but are not the most populous in their judicial districts, we find that state judiciary presence reduces the share of inspections that uncover irregularities related to waste or corruption by about 10%.

Traditional family norms often have persistent effects on household decisions. We question whether kinship ancestries of postmarital residence still affect household consumption sharing. We estimate a model of resource allocation using expenditure surveys for Ghana and Malawi, two countries in which patrilocal and matrilocal traditions coexist. Ancestral patrilocality coincides with a 10% lower resource share for women, contributing to a higher prevalence of poverty among women. Women’s resource shares increase with age, a pattern more pronounced for matrilocal groups. These results indicate how a combination of cultural and demographic factors may be used to improve policies targeted at poor individuals.

This paper tests the effect of randomly providing information on trade-specific earnings on trade choice of men and women applying to a vocational training program in the Republic of Congo. When receiving this information, both men and women apply to be trained in more lucrative trades. As a result, treated women are 28.6% more likely to apply to a traditionally male-dominated trade. These findings suggest that this kind of low-cost information intervention can be an effective way to reduce the gender gap in earnings.

The US and Mexican labor markets are closely linked through migrant workers and remittances, and changes in remittance flow may alter labor allocations in the origin households. In this paper, we investigate how the prevalence of COVID-19 in the United States affected the local labor market in Mexico. We construct a Mexican municipality-level measure of exposure to COVID-19 in the United States using data on COVID-19 prevalence across the country and data on migrants’ destinations in various states. We find a positive effect of COVID-19 exposure in the United States on hours worked among workers in Mexico, yet no significant effects were found for local wages. We also find that the effect varies across subgroups, which indicates that the responses in hours worked depend on household dynamics, the nature of the occupation-specific tasks, and migration intensity. Finally, we document the potential mechanism behind the effect on hours worked, that is, through the changes in remittances sent to the origin municipalities in Mexico.

Can informing people of high community support for social distancing encourage them to do more of it? We randomly assigned a treatment to correct individuals’ underestimates of community support for social distancing. In theory, informing people that more neighbors support social distancing than expected encourages free riding and lowers the perceived benefits from social distancing. At the same time, the treatment induces people to revise their beliefs about the infectiousness of COVID-19 upward; this perceived-infectiousness effect and the norm-adherence effect increase the perceived benefits from social distancing. We estimate the effects on social distancing, which are measured by using a combination of self-reports and reports of others. While experts surveyed in advance expected the treatment to increase social distancing, we find that its average effect is close to zero and significantly lower than expert predictions. However, the treatment’s effect is heterogeneous as predicted by theory: it decreases social distancing where current COVID-19 cases are low (where free riding dominates) but increases it where cases are high (where the perceived-infectiousness effect dominates). These findings highlight that correction of misperceptions may have heterogeneous effects depending on disease prevalence.

“Legalization and regulation” is a common approach to sex work regulation that eliminates some criminal penalties if sex workers obtain government health certification. In theory, by allowing sex workers to credibly disclose their health status, certification should enable higher prices. Yet certification rates in developing countries are typically low. I explore barriers to certification in Dakar, Senegal. I randomly offered uncertified sex workers information and an incentive covering the monetary cost of certification. This incentive only marginally increased certification. Individual- and transaction-level analysis show no evidence for a certification price premium and reveal that internalized stigma deters certification.

Millions of households devote significant energy and time collecting water. To investigate the impacts of this burden, we used a free water delivery treatment to reduce collection times to zero for randomly chosen households in rural Kenya. Data on time use and well-being come from short surveys (n=9,201) completed by 222 respondents several times each day over 6 weeks. Parents reported school attendance and study times for school-aged children. Of the approximately 120 minutes per day of water collection that the treatment eliminated, respondents reallocated approximately half to other household work and half to leisure and socializing. We find no evidence of an increase in paid work on on-farm labor. Treatment caused respondents to report feeling happier. Nonexperimental, high-frequency evidence suggests that water collection is associated with having less energy and more physical pain. Treatment increased self-reported but not school-recorded attendance, and children reallocated time savings to other chores. A significant limitation is that the short treatment period of 2 weeks will miss long-run changes if water became more durably convenient and accessible.

We hire 2,228 Indian gig-economy workers for a real-effort transcription task and randomize the gender of the (fictitious) manager as well as the delivery of performance feedback. We find that negative feedback (i.e., criticism) leads to moderate deterioration in worker attitudes, but it increases effort provision in both mandatory and voluntary tasks. By contrast, praise affects neither attitudes nor effort provision. Importantly, feedback effects do not vary between workers assigned to female and male managers. Consistent with this finding, there is no evidence for attention discrimination toward female managers, implicit gender bias, or gendered expectations among workers. By contrast, Abel (J. Human Resources 59, no. 2:470–501, 2024) employs the same research design in the United States and finds substantial gender discrimination and no effect of feedback on effort. This highlights that the effects of feedback and manager gender vary across different contexts.

This paper estimates the return to an elite-university education over a college graduate’s career in contemporary China. After allowing for university selectivity by including individual admission scores, we find a substantial premium for graduating from an elite Chinese university at the job entry that declines quickly in early career before starting to return. Results are entirely driven by cohorts entering college after the 1999 higher-education expansion. The pattern is more pronounced in coastal provinces and in economically more developed regions. The results are consistent with predictions of asymmetric employer-learning models.

Based on a life-course utility model that incorporates healthy and unhealthy, short-run and long-run consumption behavior of consumers, this study examines the unintended impact of social pensions on the smoking behaviors of the rural elderly and its underlying channels. Using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme as a policy experiment, our empirical identification rests on nonparametric fuzzy regression discontinuity to address the endogeneity problem of receiving a pension. Overall, the results indicate that receiving a pension decreases the probability of smoking and the number of cigarettes smoked. We demonstrate that the most important channel is the increase in income following the pension transfer, which makes consumers value future utility more, instead of substituting smoking with food, which is healthier. The positive health impact of social pensions is more salient for elderly individuals who are relatively poor or who have a longer life expectancy.

In the context of antipoverty programs, what are the benefits of marginal investments in interventions targeting soft skills or psychological well-being compared with direct economic assistance? We make progress on this question by benchmarking two programs against an unconditional cash transfer. One targets participants’ self-confidence and sense of agency using personal reflection and storytelling exercises. The other teaches soft skills: goal setting, public speaking, and networking. Relative to cash, the psychologically targeted intervention significantly improves psychosocial outcomes but not economic outcomes, while the soft skills program improves economic outcomes with few effects on psychosocial outcomes. However, when comparing the two interventions with one another, effects are statistically indistinguishable along most outcomes. Our results highlight the potential for targeted marginal investments in similarly designed interventions to improve specific outcomes.

Gender quotas are intended to address the underrepresentation of women in government. However, their effectiveness remains controversial. This study explores the random assignment of gender quotas across villages in India, examining whether women members of local councils affect public goods allocation in their constituencies and identifying potential challenges they face when implementing policies. We conducted a field survey in 100 villages, each with a population of approximately 400, a size corresponding to only one council member for representation in the council. The findings suggest that the performance of women council members generally aligns with that of their men counterparts in terms of public goods allocation. However, women members exhibited less effectiveness in delivering water facilities. Factors potentially hindering female members include influence from nonmember actors, such as husbands; lower educational attainment; and diminished electoral incentives. Additionally, the gender and caste of the council president impacts the performance of women council members, suggesting that overall gender and caste composition of the legislature is an important aspect to consider when evaluating the performance of women politicians.

Social connections are fundamental to human well-being. We examine the social networks of mothers of young children in rural Odisha, India. Gendered norms around marriage, mobility, and work likely shape this group’s opportunities to form and maintain ties. We track 2,170 mothers’ networks over 4 years and find a high degree of isolation. Wealthier women and women from more-advantaged castes and tribes have smaller networks than their less-advantaged peers, primarily because they know fewer women within their own socioeconomic group. There exists strong but symmetric homophily by socioeconomic group. Socioeconomic differences are associated with toilet ownership and labor force participation.