Recent economic literature has advanced the notion that cognitive biases and behavioural barriers may be important influencers of uptake decisions in respect of public programs that are designed to help disadvantaged people. This paper provides the first evidence on the determinants of uptake of...

Using data of the largest online job board in China, Zhaopin.com, we examine the impacts of the lockdown policy on the Chinese labor market demand during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. The analyses reveal that the lockdown policy, which was implemented in Wuhan on January 23, 2020,...

The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is bringing about once-in-a-century changes to human society. Three key properties escalate the COVID-19 pandemic into a syndemic. To address this triple crisis, we discuss the importance of integrating early, targeted and coordinated public...

Low-income people in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have limited access to healthcare when they are sick. To address this issue, the governments of LMICs have initiated health insurance programs that target these poor populations. However, the health benefits these programs provide are...

The word "scapegoat" is defined as "a person made to bear the blame for others," and similarly, "scapegoatism" refers to "the act or practice of assigning blame or failure to another, as to deflect attention or responsibility away from oneself" (Collins English Dictionary and Dictionary.com,...

The empirical evidence on the inter-generational effects of maternal health interventions is inconclusive, particularly the impact on cognitive ability of children. In this paper, we study one such popular policy from India, viz, the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) which is a agship health and safe...

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...

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...

In this study, we investigate whether COVID-19 deaths that occurred before vaccination rollouts impact subsequent vaccination take-up. We use data on local vaccination rates and COVID-19-related deaths from England measured at high geographic granularity. We nd that vaccination take-up as of...

We study the causal effect of maternal education on childhood immunization rates. We use the Compulsory Education Law (CEL) of 1997, and the differentiation in its implementation across regions, as instruments for schooling of young mothers in Turkey. The CEL increased the compulsory years of...