We report the results of a randomized controlled trial testing whether incentivizing physical exercise improves the academic performance of college students. As expected, the intervention increases physical activity. The main result is that it generates a strong and significant improvement in...

We use a recent policy experiment in Rio de Janeiro, the installation of permanent police stations in low-income communities (or favelas), to quantify the relationship between a reduction in crime and the change in the prices of nearby residential real estate. Using a novel data set of detailed...

The emergence of slums is a common feature in a country's path towards urbanization, structural transformation and development. Based on salient micro and macro evidence of Brazilian labor, housing and education markets, we construct a simple model to examine the conditions for slums to emerge....

Concentration to disadvantaged neighbourhoods may hinder immigrants' opportunities for social integration, so equal chances of translating available economic resources into mobility to less disadvantaged neighbourhoods are important. This paper adds to existing research on exits from poor...

The North Indian village of Palanpur has been the subject of close study over a period of six decades from 1957/8 to 2015. Himanshu et al. (2018) have documented the evolution of the village economy over this period in an exhaustive study entitled How Lives Change: Palanpur, India and...

Starting in 2004/2005, the German state Baden-Wurttemberg reduced academic track duration from nine to eight years, leaving cumulative instruction time mostly unchanged. I use this change in schooling policy to identify the effect of schooling intensity on student well-being in life and school,...

The share of couples where the wife out-earns the husband is increasing in many countries. In this paper, I investigate how this income dynamic affects mental health. Using data on all Swedish couples who married in 2001, I show that mental health is positively associated with own and spousal...

The paper is based on an individual life-cycle model, which describes the purely economic components of human capital. The present value of human capital is determined by all future income flows, which at the same time constitute the individual as well as the total tax base of a nation....

Children around the world largely rely on the formal educational system to teach them foundational mathematics and reading skills. The inability of an educational system to do so may indicate it has structural constraints. In this paper, we take advantage of three rounds of a nationally...

In this paper we apply two statistical models to the measurement of polarization to Israeli income data over the past decade in order to empirically detect income classes as sub-populations of incomes concentrated around an optimal number of poles. The statistical models compared are a...