This paper examines the causal impact of diagnostic efficiency on the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using an instrumental variable approach, we show that a 1-day decrease in the time taken to confirm the first case in a city publicly led to 9.4% and 12.7% reductions in COVID-19 prevalence and...

What are the broad societal implications of inflation and unemployment? Analyzing a dataset of over 1.9 million individuals from 156 countries via the Gallup World Poll spanning 2005 to 2021, alongside macroeconomic data at the national level, we find that both inflation and unemployment have a...

We analyze a sample of consumer-electronics products sold by the US NewEgg online-retailer to study the impact of Price Matching Guarantees (PMGs) policies on prices. By applying aDifference-in-Differences approach,we find that prices of the policy-adopting retailer increase by 4.7% during the...

This paper investigates the issue of how alternative unionization structures in labour markets affect the choice of product quality differentiation by firms in product markets, and how this determines relative welfare outcomes of different union structures. In the presence of decentralized wage...

We uniquely examine the relationship between firm-sponsored training and product quality competition. Using an oligopolistic model of both price and quality competition, we show that an increase in the sensitivity of demand to product quality will strengthen firms’ incentives to train their...

We study the impact of early cannabis use on the school to work transition of young men. Our empirical approach accounts for common unobserved confounders that jointly affect se- lection into cannabis use and the transition from school to work using a multivariate mixed proportional hazard...

This paper examines the impact of the New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) in China. Exploiting the staggered implementation of an NRPS policy expansion that began in 2009, we used a difference-in-difference approach to study the effects of the introduction of pension benefits on the health status,...

This paper analyzes the relationship between education and health outcomes using a natural experiment in Turkey. The compulsory schooling increased from 5 to 8 years in 1997. This increase was accompanied by a massive construction of classrooms and recruitment of teachers in a differential rate...

Family structure is usually believed to affect children's human capital. Is it possible that causality goes in the opposite direction? This paper shows that the behavior of family structure variables over the life cycle dramatically changes when women have babies in their forties. These data...

Health at birth is an important indicator of human capital development over the life course. This paper uses longitudinal data from the Young Lives survey and employs instrumental variable regression models to estimate the effect of birth weight on cognitive development during childhood in...