顶刊论文流

Christopher Clayton, Matteo Maggiori, Jesse Schreger

Agostina Brinatti, Nicolas Morales

Yizhou Jin, Shoshana Vasserman

Peter Christensen, Gustavo Nino, Adam Osman

Abstract We study how online job search advice affects job search behavior and labor market outcomes of unemployed workers. In a large-scale field experiment embedded in the online platform of the Danish public employment service, we provide job seekers with vacancy information and occupational recommendations. Using a two-stage randomized design with regionally varying treatment intensities, we examine both direct effects of advice and treatment spillovers. We find that advice significantly increases employment and earnings when provided to a limited share of job seekers. As treatment intensity rises, these effects diminish and eventually disappear. The decline is driven by negative spillovers among treated job seekers, consistent with increased congestion in the occupations toward which job seekers redirect their search. Spillover effects on untreated job seekers are heterogeneous and depend on how advice alters occupation-specific competition in local labor markets.

Abstract Quality regulation seeks to ensure quality and foster competition by reducing vertical differentiation, but it may also have adverse effects on market structure. We study this trade-off in the context of pharmaceutical bioequivalence, which is the primary quality standard for generic drugs. By exploiting the introduction of bioequivalence in Chile, we find that stronger regulation reduced the number of drugs in the market by 18% and increased average paid prices by 13%. We estimate a model of drug entry, certification, and demand to study how drug quality, aversion to generics, and certification costs shape the equilibrium effects of quality regulation. We find that quality regulation increased demand for generic drugs by resolving asymmetric information and reducing aversion to unbranded generics, which induced the entry of high-quality drugs in place of low-quality drugs. Consumer welfare increased despite higher prices and a lower number of firms. We compare minimum quality standards with alternative designs of quality regulation, including quality disclosure.

Abstract To study competition, innovation, and industry dynamics that arise as a result of their interaction, we develop a new oligopolistic general-equilibrium Schumpeterian growth model. This model ties together the endogenous growth, oligopolistic competition, and dynamic industrial organization literatures in a single unified framework. Within each industry, there are an endogenously determined number of large firms (“superstars”) that compete á la Cournot and a continuum of small firms which collectively constitute a competitive fringe. Firms dynamically choose their innovation strategies, cognizant of other firms' choices, and their entry and exit are endogenous. The model is consistent with the macroeconomic trends observed in the United States since the 1970s, such as the domination of industries by a small number of superstar firms, the rise of markups, market concentration, profits, and R&D spending, and the decline in business dynamism, productivity growth, and the labor share. It replicates the empirical relationship between innovation and competition within and across industries. As an application, we estimate the model to disentangle the effects of separate mechanisms on the structural transition observed in the United States, which yields striking results: (1) While the increase in the average markup causes a significant static welfare loss, this loss is overshadowed by the dynamic welfare gains from increased innovation in response to higher profit opportunities. (2) The increasing costs of innovation are found to be the primary determinant of lackluster productivity growth, i.e., ideas are getting harder to find.

Abstract When financial constraints bind, firms adjust employment in response to cash flow shocks. A 2010 revaluation of business rates, a UK tax levied on business-occupied properties, implied that similar firms, occupying similar properties in narrow geographical locations, experienced different tax changes. I find that, on average, for every ￡1 of additional cash flow triggered by the tax change, 39 pence were spent on employment, with small and leveraged firms responding the most. I use these findings to discipline a general equilibrium model with firm heterogeneity and financial frictions and quantitatively determine the aggregate effects of a fiscal transfer to firms.

This paper develops a dynamic model of the attention economy featuring two interlinked markets: a product market, where consumers have limited awareness of firms, and an attention market, where platforms attract attention by investing in free services (e.g., social media, streaming, podcasts) and sell targeted ads using data on consumer preferences. The model provides a tractable framework in which platform investment, ad-driven discovery, product demand, and ad revenue are jointly determined. The effects of data and interoperability policies can reverse over time, platform quality may be inefficiently high or low, and the rise of data-rich digital advertising can coincide with a declining ad revenue-to-GDP ratio. (JEL D43, D44, D58, D83, L86, M37)

Using administrative data from Scandinavian countries, we provide evidence on international migration responses to wealth taxes and evaluate their aggregate economic implications. We find significant migration responses among the wealthy: A 1 percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate decreases the stock of wealthy taxpayers by about 2 percent. A large fraction of the wealthy are business owners, and their businesses are negatively affected by owner out-migration. The aggregate effects are nevertheless modest: The migration responses to a 1 percentage point increase in the top wealth tax rate reduce employment by 0.02 percent, investments by 0.07 percent, and value added by 0.10 percent. (JEL D31, E22, E24, F22, H24, L26, K34)

Americans rarely marry outside their race or class group, a pattern with well-documented implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. Limited exposure may partly explain these low intergroup marriage rates. We instrument for exposure using variation in childhood neighborhoods based on whether other race and class groups had more opposite-sex children of similar age. Exposure increases interclass (high- and low-parent income) marriage but has no detectable effect on interracial (White and Black) marriage. A spatial marriage model predicts that residential segregation—one of many forms of exposure—accounts for more than one-third of marital sorting by class but less than 5 percent by race. (JEL J12, J15, J62, R23)

We study racial disparities in promotions in a setting in which promotions are formulaic: the US patent office. Using detailed administrative data that allow us to observe who is eligible for promotion when, we document that Black patent examiners experience delays in promotions they are entitled to, slowing their climb to the top of the career ladder by a year and reducing career earnings by 2.5 percent. Institutional features rule out statistical discrimination with accurate priors. Slow promotions even under Black supervisors argue against taste-based animus. Instead, the patterns fit models of belief-based discrimination. (JEL J15, J41, J71, M12, M51, O34)

We establish a link between labor scarcity and the adoption of laborsaving technology in industrializing England. During the Napoleonic Wars, more than 10 percent of the male population served in the armed forces. Where recruitment was heavy, more machines economizing on labor were adopted. Naval recruitment, instrumented by warships' coastal access, provides exogenous variation in labor scarcity and suggests that the link between labor shortages and adoption is causal. Where mechanical skills were abundant, the impact of labor scarcity on adoption appears to be larger. (JEL J24, N13, N43, N63, N73, O14, O31)

Exposure to better peers in the workplace can influence career trajectories through two opposing channels: positively, via knowledge spillovers, and negatively, through competition for advancement. We disentangle these effects by studying untrained labor market entrants and distinguishing between coworkers in the same occupation with whom they are likely to compete versus those with whom they are unlikely to compete. We find robust evidence of persistent knowledge spillovers but also identify countervailing competition effects of comparable magnitude. Both effects are more pronounced for men than for women. (JEL D83, J16, J24, M53, M54, O33)

A principal decides which party deserves a prize. Only the parties observe the state that determines who is deserving. The principal gives each party a text describing the conditions under which that party deserves the prize and asks each to report the state. The parties are nonstrategic. Each activates a known cheating procedure whose outcome depends on the state and on the text. Implementation is achieved if, whenever the parties disagree, the liar is identified by the “one-way cheating principle”: The truthful party is the unique party who could not have produced his story had the rival's story been true. (JEL D82, D91)

What are the implications of unequal access to innovation careers for the direction of innovation and inequality? Leveraging novel linked datasets in the United States and Finland, we document that innovators create products more likely to be purchased by consumers like them in terms of gender, socioeconomic status, and age. Homophily exists both within narrow product categories and across industries and has been stable in recent decades. Incorporating this “social push” channel into a growth model, we estimate that unequal access to innovation careers has a large effect on cost of living inequality and long-run growth. (JEL D63, J16, L26, M13, O31, O33, O47)

We analyze consumer surplus when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in secondand third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the consumer-optimal segmentation and show that it has a striking structure: Consumers with the same value receive the same quality in every segment, though prices differ. Under mild conditions, any segmentation harms consumers if and only if demand is sufficiently more elastic than supply. Hence, potential benefits for consumers depend critically on demand and supply elasticities. These findings have implications for regulatory policy regarding price discrimination and market segmentation. (JEL D42, D83, K21, L12, L15)

Daron Acemoglu, Daniel Huttenlocher, Asuman Ozdaglar, James Siderius

Abstract Standard New Keynesian (NK) models feature an optimal inflation target well below 2%, limited welfare losses from business cycle fluctuations and long-term monetary neutrality. We develop an NK framework with endogenous productivity and downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) which challenges these results. The interaction between endogenous growth and DNWR generates asymmetric hysteresis effects on unemployment and R&D. As a consequence, the model features a nonvertical long-run Phillips curve and a trade-off between price distortions and output hysteresis that changes the welfare-maximizing inflation rate to above 2%. Deviations from the optimal target carry welfare costs multiple times those in traditional NK models. Taylor rules that respond to the unemployment rate address more effectively the asymmetric hysteresis in our model. Results are robust to the inclusion of the effective lower bound on interest rates.

Greg Buchak, Gregor Matvos, Tomasz Piskorski, Amit Seru

Duncan Webb

Priit Jeenas

Abstract We compare and combine two distinct approaches to estimating market power in the U.S. brewing industry—one based on production data, the other on demand. Both methods produce similar estimates of average markups and reveal a recent upward trend. We then combine the two approaches in two ways. First, we replace conventional instruments in demand estimation with a moment involving a production-based markup estimate, yielding similar results. We then evaluate the common (but controversial) assumption that retail markets operate competitively, finding that demand-based markups recovered with the assumption of competitive retail markets align with production-based estimates, as long as downstream costs are accounted for.

Abstract The structure of the Social Security program presents a trade-off between benefit duration and size; individuals who claim early receive lower monthly payments. Surprisingly, even wealthy Americans with high life expectancies frequently claim benefits at the earliest eligibility age, a behavior inconsistent with conventional life-cycle theory predictions. In fact, there is a striking similarity in claiming ages across groups with vastly different life expectancies, wealth levels, and incentives to delay. This paper resolves this puzzle by introducing policy details and subjective beliefs about longevity and program rules into a rich, forward-looking life-cycle model. When included in the model, subjective beliefs substantially narrow the claiming-age gaps across education (college vs. non-college) and marital-status (married vs. single) groups. Specifically, differences in program beliefs alone account for 48.6% of the education claiming age gap and 75.1% of the marital status gap. Counterfactual policy simulations demonstrate that failing to account for these claiming mechanisms dramatically overstates individual responses to an increase in the normal retirement age and understates the resulting fiscal savings.

Juliano Assunção, Lars Peter Hansen, Todd Munson, José A. Scheinkman

Mert Demirer, Diego Jiménez-Hernández, Dean Li, Sida Peng

Eric Richert

Ian Ball, Deniz Kattwinkel

Abstract Over the past four decades, the U.S. economy has seen a decline in the share of young firms alongside a rise in the profit share of GDP. This paper explores how population aging contributes to these twin trends through a demand-side channel. The core hypothesis is that younger households exhibit lower consumer inertia—a tendency to stick with previously chosen products—than older households. As demand shifts toward more inertial consumers, entry becomes harder, incumbents raise markups, and market share tilts toward larger firms. To quantify this mechanism, I develop and calibrate a firm dynamics model with overlapping generations of consumers who differ in their degree of inertia. Using detailed micro data, I show that younger households are significantly less inertial. The model implies that population aging accounts for 20%–30% of the observed decline in young firms and rise in profits. Reduced-form evidence across U.S. states and product categories supports the model’s predictions.

Abstract Even as global oil demand has increased in recent years, it is plausible to envision scenarios in which clean energy technologies or climate policies drive demand to essentially zero by the century’s end. This article asks what such a demand decline, when anticipated, might mean for global oil supply. One possibility is a “green paradox”: producers accelerate extraction. However, because extraction requires durable capital investments, the opposite may occur: producers reduce their investment rate, decreasing extraction. To evaluate the relative strengths of these opposing mechanisms, I develop a model of global oil supply that incorporates both, among other industry features. For model inputs with the strongest empirical support, both effects are modest, with disinvestment typically outweighing the green paradox. In order for the green paradox to substantially increase cumulative global oil extraction, investments must have short time horizons, and producers’ discount rates must be less than 4% real.

Abstract We use a sufficient statistic approach to quantify the general equilibrium effects of population ageing on the returns to wealth, wealth accumulation, and global imbalances. Combining population forecasts with household survey data from twenty-five countries, we measure the compositional effect of ageing: how a changing age distribution affects wealth-to-GDP, holding the age profiles of wealth and labour income fixed. In a baseline overlapping generations model this statistic, in conjunction with cross-sectional information and two standard macro parameters, pins down general equilibrium outcomes. Since the compositional effect is positive, large, and heterogeneous across countries, our model predicts that population ageing will lower returns to wealth, increase wealth-to-GDP ratios, and widen global imbalances through the twenty-first century. These conclusions extend to a richer model in which bequests, individual savings, and the tax-and-transfer system all respond to demographic change.

Johnny Tang

Abstract We present a flexible and scalable computational framework integrating machine learning and optimization theory to solve dynamic adverse selection models with persistent private information and many types. Our approach reformulates the model into a numerically tractable structure that bypasses set-valued dynamic programming; we formally prove that, under verifiable conditions, this relaxation yields the solution to the original problem. The recast problem is solved via a parallelized value function iteration algorithm, where high-dimensional, nonlinear functions are approximated using Gaussian process regression combined with Bayesian active learning. We apply our framework to two previously intractable models: one with persistent hidden information involving up to ten types and another incorporating multiple persistent types and overreporting. Validation against known solutions and rigorous credibility measures confirms accuracy. Allowing overreporting significantly alters long-run contract outcomes, concentrating consumption away from extremes and smoothing utility promises over time.

Abstract Market definition is challenging in settings with network effects, where substitution patterns depend on changes in network size. We study these effects in the context of social media. We conduct an incentivized experiment comparing substitution in response to a proposed U.S. TikTok ban, in which all users simultaneously leave the app, with substitution when only a single user deactivates. We find substantially higher valuations of alternative social apps under a collective TikTok ban than under an individual TikTok deactivation. Mechanism evidence shows that both anticipated content-supply shifts and social coordination partly explain the wedge, with the relative importance of each channel varying across platforms. We then show that a collective time limit challenge, where peers jointly reduce TikTok and Instagram use, leads to more time spent on alternative social apps than has been observed in prior individual deactivation experiments. Together, our results suggest that individual-level substitution estimates can be an unreliable guide to market definition for network goods.

Nick Buchholz, Matthew Shum, Haiqing Xu

Benjamin Enke, Thomas Graeber, Ryan Oprea, Jeffrey Yang

Barbara Biasi, Chao Fu, John Stromme

Shmuel San

Abstract We study how firms set wages for their employees when they can legally age-discriminate across workers. We exploit an age-specific minimum wage change in the UK, which raised the minimum applying to workers aged 25 and over, leaving unchanged the minima for younger workers. Using matched employer-employee data on a low-paying sector, we show large, positive wage spillovers on workers aged under 25, which arise within firms from company wage policy. Pay equity norms offer the most parsimonious explanation for the emergence of spillovers. The effects that we document also operate in other low-paying sectors of the UK labour market.

Abstract We study how supply disruptions interact with monopoly pricing, inventory management, and consumer stockpiling in a continuous-time model. Pre-emption incentives—consumers prefer to stock up before a price hike while the firm prefers to hike before consumers stock up—lead to an equilibrium with gradual stockpiling and endogenous uncertainty over the timing of a price hike, which can trigger a run at the disruption onset. Consumer storage introduces welfare losses from randomized pricing, but can also strengthen the firm’s incentive to hold buffer stock. Rationing, price controls, and reserve mandates can each improve welfare, but only strategic government reserves can implement the social optimum.

Thomas R. Covert, Ryan Kellogg

Michela M. Tincani

Abstract In this paper, I document systematic heterogeneity in ownership and financing of firms across Eurozone countries. To rationalize these differences, I build a quantitative general equilibrium model of workers and entrepreneurs who choose debt and equity financing of their firms, subject to rich country-specific financial frictions. The novel data on firm ownership and financing, combined with the structure of the model, allows me to quantify the level of debt and equity frictions in each country. Quantitatively, I find much larger output effects from equity frictions: harmonizing them across countries would lead to nearly four times larger output effects compared to debt frictions, and removing them would increase aggregate output by 73% more. The larger impact on output is due not only to the estimated levels and dispersion of equity frictions but also to the greater risk sharing provided by equity, which further incentivizes entrepreneurs to expand their firms. Through their effect on risk sharing, equity frictions also rationalize the observed negative relationship between equity financing and wealth inequality. Quantitatively, they are responsible for over 70% of the explained variation in top wealth shares across countries.

An increasing number of decisions are guided by machine learning algorithms. But when consequential decisions are encoded in algorithms, individuals may strategically alter their behavior to achieve desired outcomes. This paper develops an empirical approach that adjusts decision algorithms to anticipate manipulation. By explicitly modeling incentives to manipulate, our approach produces decision rules that are stable under manipulation, even when the rules are fully transparent. We stress-test this approach through a large field experiment in Kenya. When implemented, linear strategy-robust decision rules outperform standard linear models such as LASSO. (JEL C45, C93, D12, D91, G51, O12, O16)

We study the effects of the largest corporate income tax cut in US history on firms and workers. To identify causal effects, we use employer-employee matched tax records and event studies comparing similarly sized firms in the same industry that faced divergent tax changes due to their preexisting legal status. Tax cuts cause increases in firms' investment, sales, profits, employment, and payrolls, with earnings gains concentrated among highly paid workers. In the short run, 87 percent of private income gains flow to the top 10 percent of the income distribution. (JEL D22, D31, G31, H25, H32, J23, L25)

We document how deepening resource scarcity results in rationing on the basis of race in a high-stakes setting: health care. Using detailed, time stamped data on 107,000 inpatient admissions to a large health system, we find that in-hospital mortality increases for Black but not White patients as hospitals reach capacity. These findings are not explained by differential patient selection. We identify rationing by wait times as a mechanism, documenting that sicker Black patients wait longer for care than healthier White patients at almost all capacity levels. Text analysis of unstructured clinical notes reveals rationing of provider effort as another mechanism. (JEL I11, I12, I14, J15)

Designing public transport networks involves trade-offs between coverage, service frequency, and direct service. We use the expansion of the bus system in Jakarta, Indonesia, to study these trade-offs. We analyze how new direct connections, changes in bus travel time, and wait-time reductions affect bus ridership and aggregate flows and estimate a transit network demand model by matching the route launch events. Commuters in Jakarta are 2–3 times more sensitive to wait time than bus time and inattentive to long routes. We develop a flexible framework to characterize optimal networks. A less concentrated network would increase ridership and commuter welfare. (JEL L92, L98, O18, R41, R42, R48)

A designer employs a dynamic protocol to elicit private information. Protocols produce a set of contextual privacy violations—information learned that may be superfluous given the context. A protocol is maximally contextually private if there is no protocol that produces a proper subset of the violations it produces, while implementing the choice rule. Contextual privacy violations arise when a choice rule makes some agents collectively, but not individually, pivotal. In auctions, designing for contextual privacy requires choosing an initial question posed to each agent and the order for querying agents. Ascending-join protocols are maximally contextually private for k-item Vickrey auctions. (JEL D44, D82)

We provide experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial and 15-year longitudinal follow-up. Secondary school scholarships delay fertility, reduce unwanted pregnancies, and change partner selection. Under-one mortality is reduced by half. We also document cognitive development gains of 0.24 standard deviations of test scores by age five among children of female scholarship recipients. Means-tested secondary school scholarships are a high-return investment, with a conservatively estimated US$4.1 in benefits for each US$1 the policy would cost the government in the long run. (JEL H52, I12, I21, I26, J13, J16, O15)

Experimental and quasi-experimental studies show that childhood neighborhoods have substantial causal impacts on children's adult earnings and other long-term socioeconomic outcomes. Several market failures are likely to lead to excessive residential segregation by parental income and to an undersupply of mixed-income neighborhoods. Missing markets for opportunity originate in capital market imperfections for borrowing on children's future earnings, neighbor spillovers, behavioral biases, and housing search frictions. Customized housing mobility services combined with subsidized housing vouchers can help low-income families move to higher-opportunity areas. Place-based policies that create mixed-income neighborhoods appear to increase long-term outcomes for less-advantaged children. (JEL I12, I32, I38, J13, J15, R23, R38)

Efficient risk sharing implies a simple factor structure for marginal utilities of expenditure (MUEs): Pareto weights divided by a common price. The standard approach infers MUEs from total expenditures, implicitly assuming homothetic preferences, unitary income elasticities, and identical price elasticities. Risk-sharing tests using total expenditures work for idiosyncratic shocks (budgets change, but not prices), but not “covariate” shocks (prices change). I describe all preferences that permit one to infer MUEs from expenditures and estimate nonhomothetic MUEs to test whether covariate shocks are shared efficiently in Uganda. This delivers sensible results; the standard approach suggests that droughts, floods, and pests are beneficial. (JEL D12, D81, O12, O13, Q12)

Digital platforms reduce geographic frictions, enabling better matching between service providers and users. I quantify reallocation gains in Swedish online health care, using nationwide time-conditional random assignment between patients and physicians. Matching high-risk patients with doctors effective at reducing Emergency Room visits lowers such visits by 4.4 percent (SE 1.3); reallocations also reduce Counter-Guideline antibiotics by 3.1 percent (1.4). I find limited trade-offs in matching; horizontal differentiation among doctors and varied patient needs allow improvement in multiple outcomes simultaneously. Efficiency-enhancing reallocations also affect equity. The findings highlight the potential for care reorganization aligning provider heterogeneity with patient needs when geographic constraints are lifted. (JEL C78, H51, I11, I13, I14, I18)

Abstract This paper studies how municipal governments jointly manage spending, credit market borrowing, and a public employee pension system. I model governments as levered investors who must meet non-defaultable pension obligations and may value government spending more than citizens. I quantify the model using data on California cities, including a new record of fiscal emergencies, tax increases required to maintain essential city services. After the financial crisis depleted pension funds, cities engaged in excessive risk-taking: the fiscal emergency option encouraged gambling for resurrection that kept cities vulnerable to shocks well into the recovery. To correct this problem, a savings requirement works better than a restriction on risk-taking or a pension funding requirement. The policy experiments emphasize that effective policies need to target the combined pension and bond finances, as policies that only target one, such as a pension funding requirement, are undermined by endogenous changes to the other.

Abstract We estimate the impact of public pension incentives on labour supply far from the normal retirement age by exploiting Poland’s switch from a defined benefit to a notional defined contribution (NDC) scheme. This reform created a sharp cohort-based discontinuity in the link between current pension contributions and future benefits. Using this discontinuity and the universe of taxpayers, we estimate an employment elasticity with respect to the net return to work of 0.51 for men at ages 51–54. We estimate a lifecycle model to match these responses and discuss the broader implications of the reform. The shift to NDC reallocates work incentives over the lifecycle, strengthening incentives at younger ages, when labour supply is relatively inelastic, and weakening them at older ages, when labour supply is more elastic. This reallocation of work incentives tends to reduce aggregate lifecycle labour supply, which highlights the advantage of targeting pension incentives towards ages at which labour supply is most responsive.

Abstract Do workers from social groups with comparable productivity distributions obtain comparable lifetime earnings? We study how a small amount of early-career discrimination propagates over time when workers’ productivity is revealed through employment. In breakdown learning environments that primarily track on-the-job failures, such discrimination spirals into a substantial lifetime earnings gap for groups of comparable productivity, whereas in breakthrough learning environments that track successes, early-career discrimination can be self-corrected, so comparable groups obtain comparable lifetime earnings. This contrast persists in large labour markets and with flexible wages, inconclusive learning, and misspecified employer beliefs.

Abstract We experimentally study decentralized one-to-one matching markets with transfers. We vary the information available to participants, complete or incomplete, and the surplus structure, supermodular or submodular. Several insights emerge. First, while markets often culminate in efficient matchings, stability is more elusive, reflecting the difficulty of arranging attendant transfers. Second, incomplete information and submodularity present hurdles to efficiency and especially stability; their combination drastically diminishes stability’s likelihood. Third, matchings form “from the top down” in complete-information supermodular markets, but exhibit many more and less-obviously ordered offers otherwise. Last, participants’ market positions matter far more than their dynamic bargaining styles for outcomes.

Abstract We show that the emergence of new economic opportunities that draw women away from their traditional domestic roles has significantly influenced the adoption of religious veiling. We measure the prevalence of veiling among young women across Indonesia’s districts for more than two decades by hand-coding around a quarter million photographs attached to Indonesia’s public high school registers. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variation generated by international demand for Indonesia’s products, interacted with the gender and sectoral composition of local industries. Districts exposed to stronger positive economic shocks—and thus greater economic opportunities for women—exhibit higher rates of veiling adoption. Our findings suggest that veiling facilitates young women’s participation in formal labour markets while safeguarding their personal and social image in society.