Samreen Malik

We investigate how mental health during COVID—specifically anxiety and depression—is associated with multifaceted outcomes among young adults: economic status, social connectedness, and life satisfaction. Utilizing unique longitudinal data collected in Kasur, Pakistan, we find that past anxiety, but not past depression, is associated with current social connectedness and, to a lesser extent, over- all life satisfaction while economic status remains unaffected. This aligns with a “standardized” life course framework where youth trajectories regarding economic status may follow a predetermined course. We support this framework by demonstrating that (i) economic status in our data is indeed very standard, mirroring the distribution of economic status in Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement (PSLM) data; (ii) parents are the primary decision makers as parental characteristics drive economic outcomes more than youth traits; and (iii) young adults have limited autonomy, especially in households with high parental authority suppressing the influence of mental health. The association of past anxiety with social connectedness and overall life satisfaction during young adult-hood informs policymakers in supporting interventions that would break cycles of isolation.

Using a randomized control trial of approximately 1,000 firm pairs in New Zealand that have a customer-supplier relationship, we provide an information treatment to analyze both the direct effects on expectations and actions of firms receiving this information and the spillover effects on connected firms that did not directly receive information. In a follow-up three months later, we find direct and spillover effects on expectations and actions that are both significant and of comparable magnitude. An increase in expected GDP growth increases prices and employment; an increase in expected GDP uncertainty reduces prices, investment, and employment. We provide evidence that it is communication between the firms, as opposed to observable actions, driving the spillover effect on the expectations of connected firms. This is consequential as we find communication to be symmetric upstream vs downstream, while propagation via actions is asymmetric. We embed firm-to-firm communication along the supply chain in a New Keynesian pricing problem and discuss its implications for the transmission of aggregate uncertainty to firms’ pricing decisions and aggregate inflation.

We study how wage gaps across skills and the skill distribution in an economy respond to trade integration. Using administrative data of Denmark (1995–2011), we find that trade has a negative effect on the wage gap between secondary and primary education and a positive effect on the wage gap between tertiary and secondary education. We also show that trade affects skill distribution and induces skill polarization: trade has a positive effect on both the mean and standard deviation of skills. Wage‐gap changes induced by trade shocks explain about 21%–30% of the effect of trade on skills.

Like many developing countries, India features a variety of land-use restrictions that make it difficult to establish industrial firms on agricultural lands. Such policies have received some of the blame for the slow pace of industrialization, and there is widespread agreement on the need for reform. Traditional agrarian economies, however, have many features that may serve as barriers to industrialization, making it unclear that land-use reform would be sufficient for promoting manufacturing growth in rural areas. To better understand the role played by such regulations, we study the effects of the Industrial Areas (IAs) program in India, which facilitated the establishment of industrial firms in areas that had previously been restricted to agriculture.We find that IAs caused a large increase in the number of firms and employment, and that there were substantial spillovers to neighboring villages. Furthermore, IAs trigger a classic "structural transformation" of the economy, with a shift of workers from agricultural to non-agricultural employment, and the creation of numerous small manufacturing and agricultural firms.

We study how the skill distribution for an economy responds to changes in the skill premium induced by trade integration. Using administrative data for Denmark (1993- 2012) and Portugal (1993-2011), we conduct a two-step analysis. In the first step we predict the skill premium changes which are triggered by exogenous trade shocks. In the second step we estimate the impact of such changes on the skill distribution. The main results for Denmark show that both the average and the standard deviation of skills increase as a result of trade integration. For Portugal we find instead that the impact of trade mediated by skill premium changes is negligible and not statistically significant. We provide a theoretical intuition to rationalize both sets of results.