Journals

This article studies the differential effect of targeting cash transfers to men or women on household expenditure on non-durables.

Fiscal Studies, Volume 41, Issue 2

Journal article published in the Journal of Health Economics in September 2020. Full (open-access) article available at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016762962030014X?via%3Dihub

We analyze how shutdown policies affected unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. We use proxy data from Google Trends to disentangle the effects of six policies. State-level policies caused 12.4% of unemployment insurance claims early on. Restaurant limits and non-essential business closures had modest effects. Other policies (e.g. stay-at-home orders, school closures) had no additional effect.

This paper exploits kinks and notches in the UK personal tax schedule over a 40-year period to investigate how taxpayers respond to income tax and social security contributions. It also develops a new approach for identifying selection in who responds and for decomposing responses into hours and wage components.

We characterize inflation dynamics during the Great Lockdown using scanner data covering millions of transactions for fast-moving consumer goods in the United Kingdom. We show that there was a significant and widespread spike in inflation.

Soda taxes aim to reduce excessive sugar consumption. We assess who are most impacted by soda taxes. We estimate demand using micro longitudinal data covering on-the-go purchases, and exploit the panel dimension to estimate individual specific preferences. We relate these preferences and counterfactual predictions to individual characteristics and show that soda taxes are relatively effective at targeting the sugar intake of the young, are less successful at targeting the intake of those with high total dietary sugar, and are unlikely to be strongly regressive especially if consumers benefit from averted internalities.

This paper investigates risk attitudes at older ages in 14 European countries. Older individuals report lower willingness to take risks in all countries.

This paper provides new evidence on the recent performance of piped water consumption subsidies in terms of pro-poor targeting for 10 low- and middle-income countries around the world. Our results suggest that in these countries, existing tariff structures fall well short of recovering the costs of service provision, and that, moreover, the resulting subsidies largely fail to achieve the goal of improving the accessibility and affordability of piped water among the poor.

We investigate state‐dependent effects of fiscal multipliers and allow for endogenous sample splitting to determine whether the U.S. economy is in a slack state.

This paper uses a dataset from Tanzania with information on consumption, income and income shocks within and across family networks.

COVID-19 has uprooted many aspects of parents’ daily routines, from their jobs to their childcare arrangements.

The spread of COVID‐19, and international measures to contain it, are having a major impact on economic activity in the UK. In this paper, we describe how this impact has varied across industries, using data on share prices of firms listed on the London Stock Exchange, and how well targeted government support for workers and companies is in light of this.

This paper studies inference of preference parameters in semiparametric discrete choice models when these parameters are not point-identified and the identified set is characterized by a class of conditional moment inequalities.

The lockdown measures that were implemented in the spring of 2020 to stop the spread of COVID‐19 are having a huge impact on economies in the UK and around the world. In addition to the direct impact of COVID‐19 on health, the following recession will have an impact on people's health outcomes.

This paper examines the pre-existing and new inequalities between ethnic groups in England and Wales exposed by the economic and public health crisis created by the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on current mortality and case data, alongside pre-crisis labour force data, to investigate the relative vulnerability of different ethnic groups to adverse health and economic impacts.

This paper discusses likely implications for healthcare delivery in the short and medium term of the responses to the coronavirus pandemic, focusing primarily on the implications for non‐coronavirus patients.