Retirement, a major transition in the life course, may affect many aspects of retirees' well-being, including health and health care utilization. Leveraging differential statutory retirement age (SRA) by occupation for China's urban female workers, we provide some of the first evidence on the...

The aim of this paper is to estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the wage polarization in Italy, combining individual characteristics with their task content in terms of physical proximity within the workplace. We use an innovative dataset which combines data from two sample surveys,...

Low healthcare quality has been found to predict the development of several illnesses in older adults, while the evidence on dementia is still lacking. This study assesses whether and to what extent experiencing low healthcare quality can be associated with developing dementia in people...

This study investigates a neglected determinant of adolescents' dietary behaviors: the within-class age difference, in isolation from confounding factors (e.g., absolute age, season-of-birth, and countries' specific characteristics, such as expected age at school start). We study a multi-country...

We present experimental evidence on the impact of delivering double-fortified salt (DFS), salt fortified with iron and iodine, through the Indian school-feeding program called “mid-day meal” on anemia, cognition, and math and reading scores of primary school children. We conducted a field...

The growth of novel flexible work formats raises a number of questions about their effects upon health and the potential public policy implications. However, answering these questions is hampered by data and identification constraints. This is the first paper that draws on comprehensive...

We estimate the impact of pension enrollment on mental well-being using China’s New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS), the largest existing pension program in the world. Since its launch in 2009, more than 400 million Chinese have enrolled in the NRPS. We first describe plausible pathways through...

This paper is one of the first to examine the associations between prenatal sunshine exposure and birth outcomes, specifically the incidence of low birth weight (LBW) and small for gestational age (SGA), based on a nationally representative birth record dataset in China. During the sample period...

Measures to contain the Corona virus (COVID-19) may pay off in terms of slowing down proliferation. The proliferation trend in France and Germany now exceeds the one in Italy, South Korea and Japan. At the same time, the containment measures seem more intense in Italy, South Korea and Japan than...

This paper examines the role of various socioeconomic factors in mediating the local and cross-city transmissions of the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) in China. We implement a machine learning approach to select instrumental variables that strongly predict virus transmission among the rich...