Two in five Americans have medical debt, nearly half of whom owe at least $2,500. Concerned by this burden, governments and private donors have undertaken large, high-profile efforts to relieve medical debt. We partnered with RIP Medical Debt to conduct two randomized experiments that relieved...

People are sometimes forced to move, and it has often been hypothesised that such relocation involves significant psychological costs. The challenge in identifying the mental health consequences of moving is that most moves are (partly) voluntary. We use a natural experiment, the mandated...

We use the UK Household Longitudinal Study and compare pre- (2017-2019) and post-Covid-19 data (April 2020) for the same group of individuals to assess and quantify changes in mental health among ethnic groups in the UK. We confirm the previously documented average deterioration in mental health...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the effects of letting people choose from a menu of increasingly challenging incentive schemes. We derive the conditions under which a policy maker profits from leaving the choice to the individuals by leveraging their private information...

Demand for personalized online tutoring in higher education is growing but there is little research on its effectiveness. We conducted an RCT offering remote peer tutoring in micro- and macroeconomics at a German university teaching online due to the Covid-pandemic. Treated students met in small...

How do parents contend with threats to the health and survival of their children? Can the social safety net mitigate negative economic effects through transfers to affected families? We study these questions by combining the universe of cancer diagnoses among Danish children with register data...

Using Austrian and Danish administrative data, we examine the impacts of parenthood on mental health. Parenthood imposes a greater mental health burden on mothers than on fathers. It creates a long-run gender gap in antidepressant prescriptions of about 93.2% (Austria) and 64.8% (Denmark). These...

How do sudden, large wealth losses affect mental health? Most prior studies of the causal effects of material well-being on health use identification strategies involving income increases; these studies as well as prior research on stock market accumulations may not inform this question if the...

While several studies suggest that stress-related mental health problems among school children are related to specific elements of schooling, empirical evidence on this causal relationship is scarce. We examine a German schooling reform that increased weekly instruction time and study its...

We study the economic consequences of stress-related occupational illnesses (burnout) using Swedish administrative data. Using a mover design, we find that high-burnout firms and stressful occupations universally raise burnout risk yet disproportionately impact low-stress-tolerance workers....