I investigate the intra-household labor and resource allocation consequences of an employment guarantee targeting rural households in India. The guarantee insures household earnings, replacing women as added workers and shutting down a motive for saving. Despite sizable program-job take-up, the...

This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most...

Evidence on cannabis legalization's effects on mental health remains scarce, despite both rapid increases in cannabis use and an ongoing mental health crisis in the United States. We use granular geographic data to estimate medical cannabis dispensary availability's effects on self-reported...

We demonstrate how mothers, fathers, and 15-17-year-old students alter their schedules around the K-12 academic year. Using regression discontinuity (RDD) methods, combined with dates on school year start and end dates by locality, we document several notable results. First, mothers are...

China's distinctive demographic landscape, early retirement policies, and deeply ingrained gender norms provide a unique backdrop for investigating gender disparities in retirement and subjective well-being. Drawing upon data from the China Family Panel Studies and leveraging the variation...

We examine the impact of a randomized therapy intervention on Nepali adolescents at risk of school dropout. Our study is the largest of its kind (N = 1,707) and is novel in that participation does not require a preexisting diagnosis. Ninety percent of those offered therapy participated, with...

People's fairness preferences are an important constraint for what constitutes an acceptable economic transaction, yet little is known about how these preferences are formed. In this paper, we provide clean evidence that previous transactions play an important role in shaping perceptions of...

Addressing climate change requires transitioning away from coal-based energy. Recent structural change models demonstrate that temporary interventions could induce permanent fuel switching when transitional dynamics exhibit strong path dependence. Exploiting changes in local coal supply driven...

We analyze patterns of bilateral financial investment using data on US investors' holdings of foreign bonds. We document a "history effect" in which the pattern of holdings seven decades ago continues to influence holdings today. 10 to 15% of the cross-country variation in US investors' foreign...

Katharine Coman's "Some Unsettled Problems of Irrigation," published in March 1911 in the first issue of the American Economic Review addressed issues of water supply, rights, and organization. These same issues have relevance today 100 years later in face of growing concern about the...