We identify dynamic impacts on domestic violence (DV) of the staggered imposition and lifting of lockdown across Chile's 346 municipalities. Lockdown increases DV helpline calls and shelter occupancy without increasing DV police reports. These results are consistent with lockdown raising incidence and creating barriers to reporting. Once lockdown is lifted, shelter occupancy falls and police reports surge, but helpline calls remain elevated in line with state dependence in DV. We identify male job loss as a mechanism driving DV. Our findings accentuate controversy around welfare impacts of lockdown mandates. Adverse impacts of lockdown on DV are mitigated by cash transfers.

This paper examines policy effectiveness as a function of leader identity. We experimentally vary leader religious identity in a coordination game implemented in India and focus on citizen reactions to leader identity, controlling for leader actions. We find that minority leaders improve coordination, and majority leaders do not. Alternative treatment arms reveal that affirmative action for minorities reverses this result, while intergroup contact improves the effectiveness of leaders of both identities. We also find that minority leaders are less effective in towns with a history of intergroup conflict. Our results demonstrate that leader and policy effectiveness depend on citizen reactions, conditioned by social identity and past conflict.

We identify earnings impacts of exposure to an infant health intervention in Sweden, using individual-linked administrative data to trace potential mechanisms. Leveraging quasi-random variation in eligibility, we estimate that exposure was associated with higher test scores in primary school for boys and girls. However, only girls were more likely to score in the top quintile. Subsequent gains, in secondary schooling, employment, and earnings, are restricted to girls. We show that the differential gains for women accrued from both skills and opportunities.

Twin births are often construed as a natural experiment in the social and natural sciences on the premise that the occurrence of twins is quasi-random. We present population-level evidence that challenges this premise. Using individual data for 17 million births in 72 countries, we demonstrate that indicators of mother's health, health-related behaviors, and the prenatal environment are systematically positively associated with twin birth. The associations are sizable, evident in richer and poorer countries—evident even among women who do not use in vitro fertilization—and hold for numerous different measures of health. We discuss potential mechanisms, showing evidence that favors selective miscarriage.

This paper investigates the sensitivity of the intergenerational transmission of health to changes in the socioeconomic and public health environment into which children are born using individual survey data on 2.24 million children born to 600,000 mothers during the period 1970 to 2000 in 38 developing countries merged by country and cohort with macroeconomic data. We find that children are more likely to bear the penalty exerted by poor maternal health if they are conceived or born in adverse socioeconomic conditions. Equivalently, shocks to the child's birth environment are more damaging of children born to women with weaker health at birth.