We study the effect of local exposure to populism on net population movements by citizenship status, gender, age and education level in the context of Italian municipalities. We present two research designs to estimate the causal effect of populist attitudes and politics. Initially, we use a...

Caseworker meetings have been shown to accelerate exit from unemployment. We explore whether they are also effectual before entering unemployment. In a natural field experiment, we offer caseworker meetings to workers at risk of losing their jobs while they are still employed. We find that the...

We examine whether parental and school investments reinforce or compensate for student performance. Our analysis exploits school-starting-age rules in 34 countries, capturing achievement variation that arises because younger children typically underperform their older peers. Parents respond to...

Universal health coverage is a widely shared goal across lower-income countries. We conducted a large-scale, 4-year trial that randomized premiums and subsidies for India's first national, public hospital insurance program, RSBY. We find roughly 60% uptake even when consumers were charged...

Cross-country employment differences are concentrated among women, the youth, and older individuals. In this paper, we document how worker flows between employment, unemployment, and out of the labor force vary by gender and age and contribute to aggregate employment differences across a large...

For many decisions, people rely on information received from others by word of mouth. How does the process of verbal transmission distort economic information? In our experiments, participants listen to audio recordings containing economic forecasts and are paid to accurately transmit the...

This paper evaluates the gender-specific distributional impact of the recent cost-of-living crisis in six European countries using the Household Budget Survey to assess the degree of regressivity (affecting lower income households more) or progessivity (affecting higher income households more)...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

We investigate public preferences for equity-enhancing policies in access to early child care, using a survey experiment with a representative sample of the German population (n ≈ 4, 800). We observe strong misperceptions about migrant-native inequalities in early child care that vary by...

Motherhood and parental leave are frequent causes of worker absences and employment interruptions, yet we know little about their effects on firms. Based on linked employer-employee data from Germany, we examine how parental leave absences affect small- and medium-sized firms. We show that they...