This paper investigates a women’s self-help group program with more than 1.5 million participants in one of the poorest rural areas of Northern India. The program has four streams of activity in micro-savings, agricultural enterprise training, health and nutrition education, and political...

We analyze the relationship between natives' attitudes towards citizenship acquisition for foreigners and trust. Our hypothesis is that, in sub-Saharan Africa, the slave trade represents the deep factor behind contemporary attitudes toward citizenship, with more intense exposure to historical...

Using data from two representative Demographic and Health Surveys, we examine the change in son preference over the past three decades and its effects on Pakistani women's fertility. We analyse a number of indicators and employ different empirical methods to come up with strong and persistent...

We study the association between the ritual of menstrual restrictions and maternal health- care access as well as women's subjective well-being. Similar restrictions, also practised around the time of childbirth, are based on the assumption that women are ritually impure during these phases of...

Academic consensus about normative prescriptions on the ethnic and cultural composition of societies has been shifting in recent decades. It has evolved from what seemed desirable but was acknowledged to be unrealistic (the noble idea of a melting pot), to what is realistic because it has...

We propose and test empirically a theory describing the endogenous formation and persistence of mega-states, using China as an example. We suggest that the relative timing of the emergence of agricultural societies, and their distance from each other, set off a race between their autochthonous...

This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence. We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries. Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an...

We document a causal effect of conservative Fox News Channel in the United States on physical distancing during COVID-19 pandemic. We measure county-level mobility covering all U.S. states and District of Columbia produced by GPS pings to 15-17 million smartphones and zip-code-level mobility...

A double disadvantage occurs when the interaction of two disadvantages generates an additional disadvantage. We show that second-generation immigrant children in the Italian primary school experience a double disadvantage that, relative to the average native, reduces scores in Italian by 17% and...

The objective of this paper is to analyse how immigrants' ethnic identity correlates with their labour market outcomes. More precisely, we estimate the role of ethnic identity in employment, wages, under-employment (i.e., they would prefer to work more hours but are not given the opportunity),...