Senegal has experienced a rapid expansion in fixed and mobile broadband Internet infrastructure over the past decade. This paper examines the relationship between access to broadband internet and household welfare between 2011 and 2018 by integrating the latest two rounds of household budget...

In low-income settings, women are vulnerable to the psychological distress caused by the social and economic impact of large-scale shocks (e.g., pandemics, natural disasters, political). This paper evaluates a randomized over-the-phone counseling intervention aimed at mitigating the mental...

We examine the medium-term impact of COVID-19 for financial well-being and technology adoption in a low-income country. The analysis is based on regionally representative panel data consisting of 1,975 micro-entrepreneurs from rural Uganda. Using a LASSO approach, we first show that several...

What are the impacts of expanding mobile broadband coverage on poverty, household consumption and labor market outcomes in developing countries? Who benefits from improved coverage of mobile internet? To respond to these questions, this paper applies a difference-in-differences estimation using...

Economists have mainly focused on human capital accumulation, rather than on the causes and consequences of human capital depreciation in late adulthood. To investigate how human capital depreciates over the life cycle, we examine how a newly introduced pension program, the National Rural...

This study appraises non-monetary multidimensional poverty in Nigeria using the novel first order dominance approach developed by Arndt et al. (2012). It examines five dimensions of deprivation: education, water, sanitation, shelter, and energy-using comparable datasets, the Nigeria Demographic...

Case studies across the social sciences have established a positive relationship between social status and happiness. In observational data, however, identification challenges remain severe. This study exploits the fact that in India people are assigned a caste from birth. In data on 1000...

A large number of empirical studies have investigated the link between social status and happiness, yet in observational data identification challenges remain severe. This study exploits the fact that in India people are assigned a caste from birth. Two identical surveys of household heads (each...

This paper revisits the debate over the importance of absolute vs. relative income as a correlate of subjective well-being using data from Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries in the world with high levels of corruption and poor governance. We do so by combining household data with...

I review the evidence on access to water and sanitation infrastructure and child outcomes In Latin America. I show that there are large differences in access across countries and, within countries, between households living in urban and rural areas. Many papers in the public health literature...