We estimate the value of a public health system exploiting a conjoint experiment in nationally representative surveys in Brazil, France and the United States in which respondents choose between different societies that randomly vary in their economic outcomes (country income, income inequality, social mobility), political outcomes (public healthcare, democracy), and the level of personal income for each respondent. This allows us to estimate the respondents’ willingness to trade off publicly provided healthcare for individual income as well as other societal attributes. We find that, on average, individuals have a strong preference for a public health system. They would need a large increase, equal to two times the average income of the country in France, and equal to 50% of the average income of the country in Brazil and the US. Most respondents support public healthcare and they do it with more intensity than its opponents. Demand for state-provided healthcare is largely driven by other-regarding preferences. Respondents that think that poverty is the outcome of luck or lack of connections, and those who lean to the political left and believe the world is zero-sum are more likely to support a public health system. Demographic traits seem uncorrelated with support for a public health system – with the exception of household wealth, which is associated with lower levels of support in France and the US.

The prevalence and determinants of intimate partner violence (IPV) among older women are understudied. This paper documents that the incidence of IPV remains high at old ages and provides the first evidence of the impact of access to income on IPV for older women. We leverage a Mexican reform that lowered the eligibility age for a non-contributory pension and a difference-in-differences approach. Women’s eligibility for the pension increases their probability of being subjected to economic, psychological, and physical IPV. The estimated effects are found only among women in the short term and are more pronounced for women who experienced family violence in childhood and those from poorer households. Looking at potential mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that men use violence as a tool to control women’s resources. Additionally, women reduce paid employment after becoming eligible for the pension, which may result in more time spent at home and greater exposure to violent partners. In contrast, we show that IPV does not increase when men become eligible for the non-contributory pension.

This paper examines the lasting impact of tourism specialization on per capita income in Spanish municipalities, aiming to understand the factors driving these effects. We employ two distinct approaches. The first one focuses on tourism development since the initial boom in the 1960s and relies on cross-sectional variation in tourism exposure related to amenities like beaches and weather for identification. The second method looks at a later wave of tourism development in the 1990s, using a shift-share analysis that combines the share of residents from tourist-source countries in each municipality with the growth rate of tourists from these countries throughout Spain. The findings indicate that municipalities with the highest growth in tourism specialization now exhibit lower per capita income. A municipality experiencing an increase in tourism per capita over time equal to the sample median has a per capita income between 21% and 22% lower as of 2019, depending on the approach used. This decline in income is associated with an increase in temporary job contracts, with a decrease in industrial employment, and with lower levels of educational attainment.

Have the recent changes in reproductive rights changed women’s perceptions of discrimination and fair treatment relative to men’s perceptions? To address this question, we collected online survey data (N=1,374) during spring 2023 using a randomized design that provided information about the enactment of State antiabortion laws and the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court to a treatment group but no information to an untreated control group. This exogenous variation in information dissemination was used to analyze perceived fairness and discrimination of treated individuals, by sex. We find that treatment increases women’s overall perception of discrimination and unfair treatment in the US by 11.5 percent of a standard deviation and their perception relative to men by 21.8 percent of a standard deviation, widening an already existing gender gap. These results support the notion that the recent state and federal abortion restrictions can impact individuals’ perceptions of fairness and discrimination in the U.S. and do so differentially by gender.

Public works programs (PWPs) are among the most used social protection instruments in low- and middle-income countries. While their impacts on poverty, food security and labor outcomes have been increasingly examined, there is a notable lack of systematic theoretical and empirical research focusing on their effects on climate resilience. To fill this gap, we began by developing a conceptual framework that links the different components of PWPs—wages, infrastructure, and skills development—to household capacity to cope with, and adapt to, weather shocks. After that, we used this framework to guide the review of empirical evidence on the multiple short- and long-term effects of PWPs on resilience to weather shocks, such as flood, drought, and cyclones. Overall, our review suggests that, through the wage component, PWPs can be effective in enhancing resilience, especially by increasing savings and investments in productive assets. However, these benefits usually only materialize in regular, long-term programs. The infrastructure component can be crucial in supporting households’ long-term capacity to adapt to shocks, especially given the recent focus on climate-smart infrastructures. Moreover, the positive effect of infrastructure may not be limited to the direct program beneficiaries but extend to the whole community in which PWPs are implemented. However, it is necessary to highlight that most of the evidence focuses on only a few programs and countries and relies on non-optimal—often cross-sectional—data. In particular, the empirical literature investigating the impacts of the infrastructure component of PWPs on both beneficiaries and other community members, especially that carried out through experimental and quasi-experimental methods, is scarce. Another critical research gap concerns the role of on-the-job training and its capacity to strengthen resilience in combination with the infrastructure/service component. Therefore, more research is needed in these directions. Only with adequate information on the overall impacts on different members of the society, and on the channels through which these effects materialize, can policymakers take decisions about when to implement PWPs, and how to design them.

We study the impact of improved rail access on entrepreneurship rates in England and Wales. We use data from the Census spanning 2001, 2011, and 2021 to analyse self-employment rates in granular geographic areas of around 200 residents. Specifically, we study how they respond to changes in the distance to the nearest train station occurring due to 56 new station openings. We find that all else equal, moving 1 km further away from a station reduces self-employment rates by 0.12 percentage points, with the effect dissipating beyond 7 km. Secondary results suggest that access to rail makes it easier to become self-employed while not making it more attractive compared to employment. Our findings suggest that rail infrastructure improvements can support local entrepreneurship and economic activity, contributing to regional development and reducing economic inequality.