Introduction to the special issue in honor of Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton: “consumption, poverty and inequality in the household”

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordIt is a great honor for me to introduce this special issue in Honor of Nobel Laureate Angus Deaton “Consumption, Poverty and Inequality in the Household”. Angus has had a major influence on my research, and I have been very fortunate to have him as teacher, mentor and co-author. His contributions to economics range from theoretical insights and econometric contributions to policy relevant empirical findings. This special issue reflects how the work by Angus has been and continues to be a great source of inspiration for economic research, and in particular for the theoretical and empirical analysis of household behavior

The weight of the crisis: Evidence from newborns in Argentina

This is the final version. Available from MIT Press via the DOI in this recordWe investigate how prenatal economic fluctuations affected birth weight in Argentina during the period from January 2000 to December 2005 and document its procyclicality. We find evidence that the birth weight of children born to low-educated (less than high school) mothers is sensitive to macroeconomic fluctuations during both the first and third trimesters of pregnancy, while those of high-educated (high school or above) mothers react only to the first trimester of pregnancy. Our results are consistent with low-educated women facing credit constraints and suffering from both nutritional deprivation and maternal stress, while high-educated women are affected only by stress.Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio

Beauty, body size and wages: Evidence from a unique data set

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Elsevier via the DOI in this record We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview in the German General Social Survey is related to weight, height, and body mass index (BMI), separately by gender and accounting for interviewers' characteristics or fixed effects. We show that height, weight, and BMI all strongly contribute to male and female attractiveness when attractiveness is rated by opposite-sex interviewers, and that anthropometric characteristics are irrelevant to male interviewers when assessing male attractiveness. We also estimate whether, controlling for beauty, body size measures are related to hourly wages. We find that anthropometric attributes play a significant role in wage regressions in addition to attractiveness, showing that body size cannot be dismissed as a simple component of beauty. Our findings are robust to controlling for health status and accounting for selection into working

Son preference and gender-biased breastfeeding in Pakistan

This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this record.We investigate gender-biased breastfeeding in Pakistan using data from the 2006–07 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey. We replicate the analysis of Jayachandran and Kuziemko (2011) in India, where a model of breastfeeding was developed that incorporates its contraceptive properties and yields several predictions regarding when mothers wean their children. We test the validity of their theory in Pakistan, where parents’ stated preference for sons is twice as large as in India. Our replication exercise strongly supports their theory: mothers breastfeed daughters significantly less (especially if there are no elder sons) to increase the chances of becoming pregnant again with the hope to conceive a son. In Pakistan, the male advantage in breastfeeding is more than twice as large as in India (0.9 vs. 0.4 months). In addition, we find similar birth-order patterns for the mother’s subjective assessment of unwanted pregnancies as we do for breastfeeding duration.Vicky Noon Educational Foundation Oxford Scholarshi

Paving streets for the poor: Experimental analysis of infrastructure effects

This is the final version. Available from MIT Press via the DOI in this recordWe provide the first experimental estimation of the effects of the supply of publicly financed urban infrastructure on property values. Using random allocation of first-time street asphalting of residential streets located in peripheral neighborhoods in Mexico, we show that within two years of the intervention, households are able to transform their increased property wealth into significantly larger rates of vehicle ownership, household appliances, and home improvements. Increased consumption is made possible by both credit use and less saving. A cost-benefit analysis indicates that the valuation of street asphalting as capitalized into property values is about as large as construction costs.Princeton UniversityPrinceton Woodrow Wilson ScholarsPrinceton Industrial Relations SectionPrinceton Research Program in Development StudiesRobert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research ProgramBerkeley EconomicsUniversitat d’AlacantLincoln Institute of Land PolicySpanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio

Bidimensional matching with heterogeneous preferences: Education and smoking in the marriage market

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Oxford University Press (OUP) via the DOI in this record.We develop a frictionless matching model under transferable utility where individuals are characterized by a continuous trait and a binary attribute. The model incorporates attributes for which there are heterogeneous preferences in the population regarding their desirability, that is, the impact of the traits cannot be summarized by a one-dimensional attractiveness index. We present a general resolution strategy based on optimal control theory, and characterize the stable matching. We then consider education and smoking status, further specify the model by observing that there are more male than female smokers above each education level, and derive additional predictions about equilibrium matching patterns and how individuals with different smoking habits "marry down" or "marry up" by education. Using the CPS March and Tobacco Use Supplements for the period 1996-2003, we find that the hypotheses based on our model predictions are borne out in the data.NSFSpanish Ministry of Science and Innovatio

COVID–19 Information, Demand and Willingness to Pay for Protective Gear in the UK

This is the final version. Available on open access from SAGE Publications via the DOI in this recordIn the first month of the UK first lockdown, we studied the demand and willingness to pay (WTP) for hand sanitizer gel, disposable face masks and disposable gloves, and how information on tested people and coronavirus deaths explains the demand and WTP for these products. The specific hypotheses to test and concrete questions to study were pre-registered in AsPredicted (#38962) on 10 April 2020, and an online survey was launched in Prolific on a sample of the UK general population representative by age, sex and ethnicity on 11 April 2020. We find that there is a demand for these products, estimate the average WTP for them, and show that the provision of information affected the demand (and WTP) for disposable face masks. Providing information on the numbers of coronavirus cumulative tested people and coronavirus cumulative deaths increases the stated demand for disposable face masks by about 8 percentage points [95% CI: 0.8, 15.1] and 11 percentage points [95% CI: 3.7, 18.2], respectively

On the Persistence of Mental Health Deterioration during the COVID-19 Pandemic by Sex and Ethnicity in the UK: Evidence from Understanding Society

This is the final version. Available on open access from De Gruyter via the DOI in this recordData and code availability: The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service. Researchers who would like to use Understanding Society need to register with the UK Data Service before being allowed to apply for or download datasets. More information: https://www.understandingsociety.ac.uk/documentation/access-data. The code to replicate the analysis in this letter is publicly available from the Harvard Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YUOWJEWe use longitudinal data from a representative sample of the UK and compare self-reported mental health, as measured by the GHQ-12 score, at three timepoints (2017–2019, April 2020 and March 2021), for the whole sample and by sex and ethnicity. Out of the 14,382 individuals interviewed in 2017–2019 and April 2020, 10,445 were interviewed again in March 2021. The mean GHQ-12 in April 2020 is 12.37 [95% CI: 12.22, 12.52] and in March 2021 is 12.36 [95% CI: 12.21, 12.51], above that of 2017–2019: 11.13 [95% CI: 10.99, 11.26]. We do not find evidence that the level of mental health goes back to pre-pandemic levels. In terms of inequalities, while the gender gap (mean difference between women and men) in mental health deterioration among White British is closing, there is no clear evidence that the ethnic gap (mean difference between ethnic minorities and White British) among men is changing

Gender inequality in COVID-19 times: Evidence from UK Prolific participants

This is the final version. Available on open access from Cambridge University Press via the DOI in this recordData availability: This article uses two types of data: primary and secondary. The secondary data comes from Understanding Society. Understanding Society is an initiative funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and various Government Departments, with scientific leadership by the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex, and survey delivery by NatCen Social Research and Kantar Public. The research data are distributed by the UK Data Service. The primary data (collected by the authors), questionnaire and replication files are publicly available from https://sites.google.com/site/climentquintanadomeque/covid-19-dataWe investigate gender differences across multiple dimensions after three months of the first UK lockdown of March 2020, using an online sample of approximately 1,500 Prolific respondents residents in the UK. We find that women’s mental health was worse than men’s along the four metrics we collected data on, that women were more concerned about getting and spreading the virus, and that women perceived the virus as more prevalent and lethal than men did. Women were also more likely to expect a new lockdown or virus outbreak by the end of 2020, and were more pessimistic about the contemporaneous and future state of the UK economy, as measured by their forecasted contemporaneous and future unemployment rates. We also show that, between earlier in 2020 before the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and June 2020, women had increased childcare and housework more than men. Neither the gender gaps in COVID19-related health and economic concerns nor the gender gaps in the increase in hours of childcare and housework can be accounted for by a rich set of control variables. Instead, we find that the gender gap in mental health can be partially accounted for by the difference in COVID-19-related health concerns between men and women

Erratum: Fatter attraction: Anthropometric and socioeconomic matching on the marriage market

This is the final version. Available from University of Chicago Press via the DOI in this recordAlfred Galichon pointed out to us an error in our paper “Fatter Attraction: Anthropometric and Socioeconomic Matching on the Marriage Market” (Chiappori, Oreffice, and Quintana-Domeque 2012). The properties derived in the theory section (sec. III) are not sufficient to validate the empirical strategy developed in the following section; the latter requires more specific assumptions. The issue can easily be described in the TU (transferable-utility) case (sec. III.B).We use the same notation as in the initial paper. In particular, women (men) are characterized by a vector ðX, εÞ RL RK (ðY , hÞ RK RL), where X (Y) is a vector of observable female (male) characteristics and ε (h) is a random vector reflecting female (male) unobservable attributes. Proposition 2 actually implies that, for any stable matching, the conditional distribution of the female index I(X), given the male characteristics Y, depends only on the male index J(Y ), and conversely. This property can be used to empirically estimate these indexes even in the most general framework, a possibility explored in forthcoming work