The aim of this article is to understand the functioning of individuals’ health-seeking behavior. It studies, theoretically and empirically, whether individuals change health care providers over time, depending on the health outcome (i.e., healed or sick) after consultation with the previous...

Self-reported data on sexual behaviors have been criticized to be unreliable. In recent studies, risky sexual behaviors have therefore been measured using biomarkers for curable sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Nevertheless, no previous research have tested how reliable such data are. In...

Financial incentives are a promising HIV prevention strategy. This paper assesses the effect on HIV incidence of a lottery program in Lesotho with low expected payments but a chance to win a high prize conditional on negative test results for sexually transmitted infections. The intervention...

This paper studies how aggregate economic conditions affect marriage markets in developing countries where marriage is regulated by traditional customary norms. We examine how local economic shocks influence the timing of marriage, and particularly child marriage, in Sub-Saharan Africa and in...

This paper investigates the influence of friends on crime, using data I collected among the homeless. To estimate the causal effects of friends and of the share of criminal friends on crime, I rely on two instruments. The first is the share of rainy days during one's first year as homeless:...

Homelessness represents the most extreme form of poverty in industrialized countries and a critical consequence of economic crisis. The economic research on homelessness is almost non-existent because of the lack of reliable data. By interviewing homeless people in Milan and with a response rate...

We investigate the historical origins of female genital cutting (FGC), a harmful practice widespread across Africa. We test the hypothesis - substantiated by historical sources - that FGC was connected to the Red Sea slave trade route, where women were sold as concubines in the Middle East and...