Johannes Haushofer

Stockholm University | SU · Department of Economics

In recent years, the psychological causes and consequences of poverty have received renewed attention from scientists and policymakers. In this essay, we summarize new developments in this literature. First, we discuss advances in our understanding of the relationship between income and psychological well-being. There is a robust positive relations...

To control the SARS‐CoV‐2 pandemic and future pathogen outbreaks requires an understanding of which nonpharmaceutical interventions are effective at reducing transmission. Observational studies, however, are subject to biases that could erroneously suggest an impact on transmission, even when there is no true effect. Cluster randomized trials permi...

How large economic stimuli generate individual and aggregate responses is a central question in economics, but has not been studied experimentally. We provided one‐time cash transfers of about USD 1000 to over 10,500 poor households across 653 randomized villages in rural Kenya. The implied fiscal shock was over 15 percent of local GDP. We find lar...

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reported holding normative beliefs in support of COVID-19 containment measures, as well as hi...

To control the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and future pathogen outbreaks requires an understanding of which non-pharmaceutical interventions are effective at reducing transmission. Observational studies, however, are subject to biases, even when there is no true effect. Cluster randomized trials provide a means to conduct valid hypothesis tests of the effe...

Recent work in behavioral economics has shown that stress increases choices of smaller, sooner gains relative to larger, later monetary gains. The simplest model that explains these findings is one in which stress increases the discount rate or present bias. A sharp test of this model is provided by intertemporal choices in the losses or effort dom...

Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from ov...

Skepticism about the quality of health systems and their consequent underuse are thought to contribute to high rates of mortality in the developing world. The perceived quality of health services may be especially critical during epidemics, when people choose whether to cooperate with response efforts and frontline health workers. Can improving the...

Abstract Background Pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa tend to have low adherence to antenatal and postnatal care regimens, contributing to high infant and child mortality rates. Despite low adherence figures and the high returns from attending antenatal and postnatal care visits, research on interventions to improve adherence is in its infancy....

We can exploit randomized controlled trials, compartmental models, and spillovers.

We investigate differences in spousal reports of intimate partner violence (IPV) against women and men using a sample of 800 couples in rural Kenya. We find that up to one-third of couples disagree but that disagreement varies by violence type and victim's gender. We study the role of gender attitudes in explaining this heterogeneity. We find that...

Postmortems on the recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa suggest that effective community engagement helped slow transmission by encouraging people to come forward and be tested. We evaluate the impact of Community Care Centers: a new crisis response model designed to allay fears about western medical care and, thus, encourage early reporting, isola...

We conduct a laboratory experiment in Kenya in which we elicit time and risk preference parameters from 494 participants, using convex time budgets and tightly controlling for transaction costs. Using the Kenyan mobile money system M-Pesa to make real-time transfers to subjects’ phones , we vary whether same-day payments are made immediately after...

We conducted a large-scale survey covering 58 countries and over 100,000 respondents between late March and early April 2020 to study beliefs and attitudes towards citizens’ and governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Most respondents reacted strongly to the crisis: they report engaging in social distancing and hygiene behaviors, and belie...

We study the effects of a USD 1076 PPP (USD 485 nominal) unconditional cash transfer, a five-week psychotherapy treatment, and the combination of both interventions on economic and psychological well-being among 5,756 individuals in rural Kenya using a randomized controlled trial. One year after the interventions, cash transfer recipients have high...

We use a randomized experiment in Nairobi to compare the effect of free health insurance to an unconditional cash transfer of the same value and a control group. Despite high baseline rates of injury and illness, the median insurance taker does not use the insurance. We observe no significant effects of either insurance or cash on economic outcomes...

Did affluence lead to psychological changes such as reduced discounting, and did these changes facilitate the innovation associated with the Industrial Revolution? I argue that claims of this sort are best made when they can be supported by causal evidence and good psychological measurement. When we have neither identifying variation nor adequate m...

Randomized controlled trials, which randomly allocate benefits to a treatment group and not a control group, ascribe differences in post-treatment welfare to the benefits being allocated. However, it is possible that potential recipients’ welfare is not only affected by the receipt of the program, but also by the allocation mechanism (procedural ut...

Background Epidemiological research suggests an interrelationship between mental health problems and the (re)occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV). However, little is known about the impact of mental health treatments on IPV victimization or perpetration, especially in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Methods We conducted a systema...

We propose a technique for assessing robustness to demand effects of findings from experiments and surveys. The core idea is that by deliberately inducing demand in a structured way we can bound its influence. We present a model in which participants respond to their beliefs about the researcher's objectives. Bounds are obtained by manipulating tho...

In recent years, atheism has grown in popularity, partly inspired by the rise to prominence of a group of public intellectuals called the “New Atheists” who argue against religion in public fora. What are the social consequences of this development? We test in a laboratory study in Kenya whether exposure to atheist arguments affects self-reported a...

Mental health has been included in the UN Sustainable Development Goals. However, uncertainty exists about the extent to which the major social determinants of mental disorders are addressed by these goals. The aim of this study was to develop a conceptual framework for the social determinants of mental disorders that is aligned with the Sustainabl...

Pepper & Nettle make an ambitious and compelling attempt to isolate a common cause of what they call the behavioral constellation of deprivation. We agree with the authors that limited control can indeed help explain part of the difference in observed present-oriented behavior between the poor and the rich. However, we suggest that mortality risk i...

Developing countries have low adherence to medical regimens like water chlorination or antenatal and postnatal care, contributing to high infant and child mortality rates. We hypothesize that high levels of stress affect adherence through temporal discounting, self-efficacy, and executive control. Measurement of these constructs in developing count...

International development policy is ripe for an overhaul. Behavioral science can help policymakers to spur changes in behaviors that are difficult to explain from a conventional economic perspective and impede economic development. We focus here on two well-documented, often coinciding psychological phenomena that have particularly wide-ranging imp...

We use a randomized controlled trial to study the response of poor households in rural Kenya to large, unconditional cash transfers from the NGO GiveDirectly. The transfers differ from other programs in that they are explicitly unconditional, large, and concentrated in time. We randomized at both the village and household levels; further, within th...

Human civilization is based on the successful pursuit of long-term goals, requiring the ability to forego immediate pleasure for the sake of larger future rewards. This ability improves with age, but the precise cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying its development remain elusive. The developmental changes could result either from younger chil...

Poverty remains one of the most pressing problems facing the world; the mechanisms through which poverty arises and perpetuates itself, however, are not well understood. Here, we examine the evidence for the hypothesis that poverty may have particular psychological consequences that can lead to economic behaviors that make it difficult to escape po...

Intertemporal choices - involving decisions which trade off instant and delayed outcomes - are often made under stress. It remains unknown, however, whether and how stress affects intertemporal choice. We subjected 142 healthy male subjects to a laboratory stress or control protocol, and asked them to make a series of intertemporal choices either d...

Does poverty lead to stress? Despite several studies showing correlations between socioeconomic status and levels of the stress hormone cortisol, it remains unknown whether this relationship is causal. We used random weather shocks in Kenya to address this question. Our identification strategy exploits the fact that rainfall is an important input f...

Intertemporal choices, involving decisions which trade o ff outcomes at different points in time, are often made under stress. Stress activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, resulting in the release of corticosteroids. Recent studies provide evidence that corticosteroids can induce rapid non-genomic effects followed by slower genom...

While Randomized Controlled Trials and lab-in-the-field experiments have become more common in development economics in recent years, the rigor and control of laboratory-based experiments has so far been difficult to access in developing countries. Here we summarize the creation of the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, a state-of-the-art labo...

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Although animal researchers established the role of testosterone as a 'social hormone' decades ago, the investigation of its causal influence on human social behaviors has only recently begun. Here, we review and discuss recent studies showing the causal effects of testosterone on social interactions in animals and humans, and outline the basic neu...

We thank Golan and Rosenblatt (1) for their comments on our analysis (2), which we address in turn. First, Golan and Rosenblatt suggest that the time series may be nonstationary (that is, the distribution of the variables in the data may change over time). Our original paper addressed this concern in two ways. First, we tested for stationarity usin...

Repeated eye movements made to visual targets can yield a bimodal distribution of saccadic latencies the first mode of which was termed express saccades by Fischer and Boch. We have carried out a series of experiments in monkeys to identify the conditions necessary for express saccade generation, the rules involved, and the brain structures respons...

Ending violent international conflicts requires understanding the causal factors that perpetuate them. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israelis and Palestinians each tend to see themselves as victims, engaging in violence only in response to attacks initiated by a fundamentally and implacably violent foe bent on their destruction. Econometric...

Much recent research documents people's willingness to punish norm violations and to enforce social norms. This willingness also exists if the punishers derive no material benefit themselves, but instead incur costs (Henrich et al., 2001). Even unaffected third parties who merely observe a norm violation engage in costly norm enforcement (Fehr and...

Prior research has identified the lateral occipital complex (LOC) as a critical cortical region for the representation of object shape in humans. However, little is known about the nature of the representations contained in the LOC and their relationship to the perceptual experience of shape. We used human functional MRI to measure the physical, be...

What is the neural code for object shape? Despite intensive research, the precise nature of object representations in high-level visual cortex remains elusive. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that convex shapes are encoded in a privileged fashion by human lateral occipital complex (LOC), a region that has been impli...

Two papers in the current issue of Neuron (Izuma et al. and Zink et al.) report that activity in specific regions of the brain, especially the striatum, reflects a common signal of reward in both the economic (e.g., money) and social (e.g., praise and status) domains.

Neuroimaging research over the past decade has revealed a detailed picture of the functional organization of the human brain. Here we focus on two fundamental questions that are raised by the detailed mapping of sensory and cognitive functions and illustrate these questions with findings from the object-vision pathway. First, are functionally speci...

How does experience change representations of visual objects in the brain? Do cortical object representations reflect category membership? In this issue of Neuron, Jiang et al. show that category training leads to sharpening of neural responses in high-level visual cortex; in contrast, category boundaries may be represented only in prefrontal corte...

The latencies of saccades to suddenly appearing eccentric targets can have a bimodal distribution, with an early, express peak, and a late, regular peak (Fischer and Boch 1983, Brain Res 260: 21-26). Express saccades usually are a product of learning. The purpose of this study was to determine whether this learning is specific to the relative posit...

When subjects are asked to divide objects into natural parts, they tend to choose convex contour segments as parts. Furthermore, they are faster and more accurate in remembering and judging convex than concave contours (Driver & Baylis, 1995). One potential underlying neural mechanism is that cells in the human lateral occipital complex (LOC), an a...

The extent to which target predictability and precueing affect express saccade generation was determined in Rhesus monkeys. Target predictability, as manipulated by the probability with which targets appeared at various locations, had a strong influence on express saccade generation. Pre-cueing the location of the appearance of an impending single...

The frequency with which express saccades are generated under a variety of conditions in rhesus monkeys was examined. Increasing the gap time between fixation spot termination and target onset increased express saccade frequency but was progressively less effective in doing so as the number of target positions in the sample was increased. Express s...