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Current Research

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Economists from around the world are using real time data collection to better understand the impact the Covid-19 crisis is having on families, workers, firms and society, and how policies can help the recovery out of the crisis. Find out more about how these research teams are carrying out their projects, and what their findings are below.

Be kind: domestic violence and mental health during a strict Covid-19 lockdown

The proposed study is going to exploit timing of a nationwide Covid-19 lockdown to estimate the impacts of social distancing on domestic violence incidents and mental health referrals using administrative data in New Zealand. To estimate local averag...
Secondary Topic: Crime & policing
Lead investigator: Kabir Dasgupta
Countries

Heterogeneous consumption and income responses during the Covid-19 crisis

This project aims to examine the distributional consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic using the Singapore Life Panel (SLP), a unique monthly panel dataset which contains detailed information on income, consumption and wealth for a representative samp...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Jing Li
Countries

How does the Covid-19 outbreak affect people’s expectation about the macroeconomy?

We conduct an incentivized online experiment to investigate the effect of Covid-19 on people’s expectation about the macroeconomy including economic growth rate, inflation rate, house price, and personal consumption, saving, and investment. We elic...
Lead investigator: King King Li
Countries

Epidemics, trade and containment policies

The unprecedented spread of Covid-19 has severely disrupted the global economy. This project intends to incorporate the canonical epidemiology mechanism into a two-country dynamic Melitz model to investigate quantitatively how health shock affects th...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Secondary Topic: Trade & supply chains
Lead investigator: Kang Shi
Countries

Trust in the state and citizen cooperation: evidence from Pakistan

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, we are conducting a randomized controlled trial in Pakistan. We aim to test the effectiveness of different information treatments designed to increase citizens’ trust in the government, specifically the gove...
Lead investigator: Adnan Khan
Countries

Heterogeneous vulnerability to the Covid-19 crisis in Japan

We study how the Covid-19 crisis could affect earnings inequality across heterogeneous individuals in Japan. We use the Employment Structure Basic Survey by Statistics Bureau of Japan to identify groups of workers who are more susceptible to the shoc...
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Shinnosuke Kikuchi
Countries

The trade-offs between economy and health: an assessment of Covid-19 policies in Japan

The goal of this project is to assess the macroeconomic consequence of Japanese economic and health policies in the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Based on Eichenbaum-Rebelo Trabandt (2020)'s pandemic macro model, we (i) distinguish tested/non-teste...
Primary Topic: Recession & recovery
Lead investigator: Munechika Katayama
Countries

Understanding the response to and recovery from the Covid-19 crisis among informal sector workers in urban India

In an ongoing randomized control trial, we study the impact of social networks on take-up of an aggregator service in Delhi, India that provides information on jobs, with subsequent implications on women and their spouses’ employment outcomes, inco...
Lead investigator: Farzana Afridi
Countries

Constraints to female entrepreneurship in Pakistan: the role of women’s goals and aspirations

We are running a field experiment with female entrepreneurs who have all borrowed from a microfinance organization in Punjab, Pakistan. We test whether an intervention that exposes women to successful role models, and encourages goal setting, plannin...
Primary Topic: Business, big & small
Secondary Topic: Families & households
Lead investigator: Giovanna D'Adda
Countries

The impact of Covid-19 on food and nutrition security in Bangladesh

The Coronavirus disease (Covid-19) has created a major health and economic crisis globally. As of April 11th, there were almost 1.7 million confirmed cases and more than 100,000 reported deaths due to the virus. The first Covid-19 case was confirmed ...
Primary Topic: Families & households
Secondary Topic: Inequality & poverty
Lead investigator: Akhter Ahmed
Countries