Search

Children in developing countries are vulnerable to shocks and adversities and child labor is often seen as a direct consequence of poverty and economic downturns. While such univocal causality may appear obvious, its empirical basis has not been systematically evaluated. To understand the linkages between shocks, changes in the economic situation of families and child labor, we therefore conduct a systematic literature review on the impact of income‐related shocks on child labor. We evaluate empirical studies of weather events and natural disasters, agricultural shocks such as crop failures, family shocks like parental illness, price shocks and transnational shocks through trade, migration, and remittances. Focusing on the literature that identifies causal effects, we find that the relationship between shocks and child labor is far from univocal. While in most cases adverse shocks increase child labor, we find that favorable shocks that improve earning opportunities may also cause more child labor. Policies to tackle child labor should therefore develop safety nets that minimize the probability of children being used as buffers in adverse economic downturns, but also consider the risk that positive economic shocks may attract children into labor due to changes to the value of children's time spent working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we investigate the gender gap in personal financial distress within the United States. Our study commences with a rigorous quantification of the gender disparity in financial distress, employing Logit regressions. Additionally, we perform a standard meditation analysis to dissect potential channels of income shocks and financial choices as well as their relative contributions to the gender disparity in financial distress. Leveraging data from the NLSY79 CYA panel, we empirically uncover that women are associated with a higher likelihood of experiencing financial distress than men. Furthermore, we provide evidence that women's susceptibility to adverse income shocks and tendency towards making suboptimal financial choices are two potential mechanisms, with the latter accounting for a higher proportion in the identified gender gap than the former. Our findings are confirmed by various robustness checks including exploring other financial distress dimensions, accommodating additional personality traits, employing targeted subsample analyses, performing heterogeneity tests, using clustered standard errors at the regional level, and switching to an alternative sample. Our study sheds light on the effect of gender in personal financial fragility and the role of gender gap in economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic conditions may significantly affect households' shopping behavior and, by extension, retailers' and manufacturers' firm performance. By explicitly distinguishing between two basic types of economic conditions—micro conditions, in terms of households' personal income, and macro conditions, in terms of the business cycle—this study analyzes how households adjust their grocery shopping behavior. The authors observe more than 5,000 households over eight years and analyze shopping outcomes in terms of what, where, and how much they shop and spend. Results show that micro and macro conditions substantially influence shopping outcomes, but in very different ways. Microeconomic changes lead households to adjust primarily their overall purchase volume—that is, after losing income, households buy fewer products and spend less in total. In contrast, macroeconomic changes cause pronounced structural shifts in households' shopping basket allocation and spending behavior. Specifically, during contractions, households shift purchases toward private labels while also buying and consequently spending more than during expansions. During expansions, however, households increasingly purchase national brands but keep their total spending constant. The authors discuss psychological and sociological mechanisms that can explain the differential effects of micro and macro conditions on shopping behavior and develop important diagnostic and normative implications for retailers and manufacturers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the association between the Covid-19 pandemic and and access to basic needs, and how households respond using various coping strategies in the context of Nigeria. We use data from the Covid-19 National Longitudinal Phone Surveys (Covid-19 NLPS-2020) conducted during the Covid-19 lockdown. Our findings reveal that the Covid-19 pandemic is associated with households' exposure to shocks such as illness or injury, disruption of farming, job losses, non-farm business closure, and increase in price of food items and farming inputs. These negative shocks have severe consequences on access to basic needs of households, and the outcomes are heterogeneous across gender of household head and rural–urban residence. Households adopt a number of coping strategies, both formal and informal to mitigate the effects of the shocks on access to basic needs. The findings of this paper lend credence to the growing evidence on need to support households exposed to negative shocks and the role of formal coping mechanisms for households in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 crisis has not only increased socio-economic inequalities globally but it also severely affected people's everyday lives. This study explores the impacts of COVID-19 on household income, food security, and food consumption patterns in the urban slums of Punjab, Pakistan. Using a multistage random sampling method, cross-sectional data was collected from 257 households through face-to-face interviews. Respondents were chosen randomly applying the random walk method. The data were analysed using Probit regression models. The household food security situation was estimated using the food insecurity experience scale (HFIES) developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Results show that household income and food security situations during the COVID-19 pandemic were significantly affected by education level, household size, daily-wage earnings, salaried employment, and household income slot-I. Household participation in social safety programs appears to help mitigate income shocks and decrease food insecurity. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, 73.92% and 54.86% of the surveyed households faced income shocks and worsened food security, respectively. The consumption of meat, poultry products, and seafood decreased by 21.01%, 17.50%, and 14.39%, respectively, during the pandemic, in comparison to the pre-pandemic period. The study recommends that authorities should consider continuously focusing on supporting existing national social safety programs and designing new ones by providing responsive packages during such adversities. Further, structuring robust financial institutions to aid business recovery and to ensure the availability of food to marginalised communities, particularly in urban slums, could sustain the masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We use panel data from the Italian Survey of Household Income and Wealth from 1991 to 2016 to document empirically what components of the household budget constraint change in response to shocks to household labor income, both over shorter and over longer horizons. We show that shocks to labor income are associated with negligible changes in transfers and non-labor income components, modest changes in consumption expenditures, and large changes in wealth. We then split the sample in households which do not own business or real estate wealth, and households who do. For the first group, we find that consumption responses are more substantial (and increasing with the horizon of the income shock) and wealth responses are much smaller. We show that, for this group, a version of the standard PIH framework that allows for partial insurance against even permanent income shocks can explain well the consumption and wealth responses, both at short and long horizons. For the second group the standard framework cannot explain the large changes in wealth associated with income shocks. We conclude that models which include shocks to the value of household wealth are necessary to fully evaluate the sources and the consequences of household resource risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the causal effect of positive income shocks on education in Vietnam using the 1993 and 1998 Vietnam Living Standard Surveys. We measure income shocks by families' lottery winnings, controlling for lottery purchases. In general, lottery winnings have no significant effect on school enrolment. However, we find a positive and significant effect from lottery winnings on expenditure for children's education. A 1% increase in lottery winnings increases expenditure on children's education by 0.12%. Interestingly, we find a stronger effect from lottery winnings on school enrolment and expenditure for education for girls than for boys, helping to decrease gender inequality in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing evidence shows that the COVID-19 pandemic led to larger employment losses for working women in India. This article examines the heterogeneity that underlies these trends by studying the impact of income shocks due to the COVID-19 induced national lockdown (April–May 2020) on women's employment. Using individual-level panel data and a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits the imposition of the lockdown and accounts for seasonal employment trends, the study finds that women in households facing a hundred percent reduction in men's income during the lockdown were 1.57 pp (27 percent) more likely to take up work after restrictions eased (June–August 2020). These results are predominant in poorer and less educated households. However, these positive employment trends are largely transitory as the effect on women's employment reduces to 13 percent in these households during September–December 2020. These findings underscore the use of women's labor as insurance during low-income periods by poorer households. Women's labor acts as insurance during periods of men's income loss. The increase in labor market participation is only observed for married women. Rural women participate in less-secure casual agricultural labor. Urban women access more secure fixed-wage work and self-employment. Increase in women's labor force participation is mostly transitory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the income effect on health spending and health behaviors in Vietnam. We measure income shock by lottery prizes, controlling for spending on the lottery. Lottery prizes have no significant effect on the healthcare utilization of individuals. However, we find that lottery winnings result in a significant increase in spending on healthcare. A 1% increase in lottery winnings results in a 0.08% increase in expenditure on medicine and a 0.09% increase in the total amount individuals spend on healthcare. The effect on expenditure on healthcare tends to be larger for older people. A concern with increased income is the unexpected effect on risky health behaviors, such as smoking and drinking. In this study, we do not find that lottery prizes lead to greater spending on tobacco and alcohol. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic downturns may have important implications for the educational attainment and human capital accumulation of children. We examine how income losses during the Great Recession were associated with children's educational performance in Ireland, one of the countries most severely affected by the global financial crisis. Using longitudinal data from a nationally representative child cohort study, collected before and after the recession at ages 9 and 13 years, we estimate panel models to examine the impact of income changes on standardized tests. We explore both objective and subjective measures of recession impact, and investigate non‐linearities and effect heterogeneity using quantile regression. While income is strongly associated with educational performance overall, there is little evidence of a short‐run negative impact of income shocks during the Great Recession on children's test scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In rural areas of developing countries, shocks and financial constraints on households are generally recognized as obstacles to children’s schooling opportunities. This paper investigates the effects of income shocks and borrowing constraints on household demand for education in rural Thailand, using the Townsend Thai panel data spanning from 2013 to 2017. Information on annual rainfall at the provincial level is used to estimate a transitory income component for Thai rural households. Estimation results indicate that income risks and borrowing constraints have a substantial negative impact on child schooling outcomes, including educational attainment and the number of years delayed in school. It also finds that transitory income results in increased household education expenditures conditional on children’s attendance at school. These findings suggest that in addition to households’ socioeconomic status, children’s human capital is at risk mainly due to income uncertainty and the absence of well-developed financial and insurance markets.

Abstract We review findings from the emerging microeconomic literature on observed changes in food insecurity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. To do so, we focus our review on studies in low- and middle-income countries that include household survey data measuring food insecurity collected both before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. We first focus on several studies—seven from countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and one from India—that estimate immediate changes in food insecurity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Next, we review subsequent analysis studying longer term changes in food insecurity associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. This review, therefore, complements existing macroeconomic projections of food insecurity based on expected changes in income and prices.

This study investigates the impact of mass floods on children's schooling in Pakistan. More precisely, it explores the effect of the 2010 floods that destroyed nearly 11,000 schools and left approximately half a million children out of school. Analyzing household data, we show that the flood resulted in children dropping out of school and plummeting education levels and literacy and school completion rates. Furthermore, the mechanisms behind these poor schooling outcomes are that employment and income levels fall drastically, and households adopt a self-insuring strategy—withdraw children from school and put them into child labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does becoming poorer always cause people to shift their attitudes towards higher demand for redistribution? Through a systematic review of the literature on this question, we reveal five important themes in existing research: a person’s current income, their future expectations, their expectations about redistribution benefits, their income in early life and their attitudes towards beneficiaries. Identifying these themes helps explain why responses to economic hardship are variable and heterogeneous, and can very usefully guide future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International commodity price shocks may have large impacts on producers in developing countries. In this paper, a unique household panel data from Ethiopia is utilized to show that a decrease in international coffee price has strong pass-through to the consumption of households that rely on coffee production as a main source of livelihood. It also results in decreases in on-farm labor supply (particularly male labor supply) and induces reallocation of labor towards non-coffee fields, but has negligible effect on off-farm labor supply. The decline in consumption has significant consequences on child malnutrition: children born in coffee-producing households during low coffee price periods have lower weight-for-age and weight-for-height z -scores than their peers born in non-coffee households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-run income shocks can negatively impact school attendance when children are pulled out in order to work, either based on the need for greater income during negative shocks or the increased opportunity cost of child time during positive shocks. This paper proxies for income shocks using fluctuations in local rainfall and evaluates its impact on child schooling, labour force participation, and domestic work. We then investigate whether conditional cash transfers are able to protect school attendance during these temporary shocks. Using data on Brazil's Bolsa Família programme along with municipal-level rainfall data, we find that positive rainfall shocks cause children to increase the likelihood of paid labour but Bolsa partially mitigates these effects, though less so among boys and older children. Furthermore, we find evidence that even when children do not drop out of school during these shocks, Bolsa may not fully maintain their intensity of school attendance and shocks may hinder academic progress. These results suggest that higher wages cause children to substitute time away from schooling, but that Bolsa acts as a partial safety net that stabilises human capital investments during short-run shocks and may help produce larger long-run benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallholder agricultural commodity suppliers in developing countries are often vulnerable to global commodity price fluctuations. Using panel data on farmers from an area of Tanzania where most farmers grow coffee, this study finds that global coffee prices matter for household outcomes, through their effects on farmgate prices, coffee sales and revenues, and household expenditures. The article documents that households cope with coffee price busts by increasing enterprise ownership, an effect that is greater for households without access to other means of coping. Comparisons of mean outcomes of enterprises operated by coper households (which operated an enterprise only in periods of low coffee price) with those of stayer households (which operated an enterprise throughout the sample period) indicate that the former are less likely to be profitable or to hire workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The forced migration literature has acknowledged violence as the main driver of internal displacement in the context of armed conflicts. Nonetheless, scant attention has been devoted to the role of income, a factor identified by the standard economic literature as the key driver of voluntary migration. This study aims to fill in this gap by investigating the impact of agricultural income shocks on the number of internally displaced persons fleeing from violence, in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. To address the possible endogeneity between forced migration and income, we use the standardized deviation of rainfall from its historic mean as an instrumental variable for municipal agricultural income. Our main results suggest that the elasticity of forced migration with respect to agricultural income shocks is unitary. This finding highlights the fact that forced migration is the result of a complex decision-making process where violence interacts with individual characteristics and environmental factors. Therefore, public policies aimed at reducing forced migration from rural to urban areas should develop comprehensive strategies that not only improve security conditions at the place of origin but also enhance agricultural productivity and provide access to risk-coping mechanisms for farmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study estimates the degree of the transmission of income shocks to consumption using the partial insurance model of Blundell et al. (2008) and data taken from the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers that cover the recessions in the 2000s. The analysis finds that the transmission of permanent income shocks to consumption was insured by half, whereas transitory income shocks were almost fully insured. Meanwhile, permanent income shocks statistically did not change over this period, whereas transitory income shocks did. These results suggest that the partial insurance model does not contradict observational changes in consumption and income inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to minimise the negative economic impacts of COVID‐19 on vulnerable households the South African government allocated R50 billion in additional social assistance spending. The cash transfer package included a temporary increase in existing grants and introduced a new "Covid grant." We assess the chosen package and compare it with an initial proposal to increase the Child Support Grant (CSG). Coverage, cost and welfare effects are calculated to measure the relative impacts in each case. We find that while a significant increase in the CSG delivers resources most progressively, the addition of the COVID‐19 grant may potentially reach a much larger group of otherwise uncovered, vulnerable individuals. Critically, this extended coverage comes at a cost to the poorest households, via additional transfers to the upper income deciles. However, we identify several categories of vulnerable household groups which suggests that the workers most negatively affected by the pandemic are not necessarily those in the poorest households. The paper emphasises that social assistance to mitigate the consequences of COVID‐19 should not be viewed necessarily as a standard poverty reduction exercise, but rather as an attempt to mitigate COVID‐19‐related income shocks for the vulnerable who were most negatively affected by the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we aim to estimate the causal effect of income shocks on migration in rural Vietnam. We use rainfall extremes as an exogenous source for income shocks. We find that high rainfall extremes increase income growth of households, while low rainfall extremes reduce their income growth. Using these rainfall extremes as the instrumental variables for income shocks, we find that negative income shocks encourage the migration. Experiencing a decrease in per capita income increases the probability of migration of rural people by 0.06. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Housing Vouchers supplied through the Section 8 program provide sizable income shocks to recipient families. • The majority of these families do not move to new neighborhoods that are much improved in terms of poverty rates or crime. • Using a housing voucher lottery in Houston that introduced randomness in the timing of program enrollment, we find no discernible impact of voucher offer on arrests of the heads of household for a variety of types of crime. • When we look at the population of individuals who eventually use a voucher to pay their rent, voucher receipt leads to more arrests for violent crime, driven by individuals with a criminal history and males. Employing exogenous variation in randomized wait-list positions assigned using a lottery, we identify the causal effects of Section 8 housing vouchers on arrests of adult household heads. Based on administrative records from Houston, we find that voucher receipt has no effect on the likelihood of arrest. Even among the groups with the highest propensities for crime, the vouchers have no impact. Income effects for these adults are particularly large relative to neighborhood effects, leading us to believe that this large income shock does little to alleviate financial pressures that could lead to crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) for the years 2004–2012 and examined the impact of economic shocks on the family's out-of-pocket health care spending burden. We defined this burden as the share of family income devoted to out-of-pocket health care spending. In contrast to static, cross-sectional analyses, our study examined how the within-family change in this spending burden over the 2-year MEPS observation period responded to losses in family income, insurance, and employment. To investigate the change in spending burden, we applied generalized linear health expenditure models using the correlated random effects method to control for time-invariant, unobserved heterogeneity across family units. We found evidence that the family's out-of-pocket spending burden increased with income losses, but that the change in total health care spending and in out-of-pocket spending were generally not sensitive to income shocks. These findings suggest that in the short run, income changes rather than changes in health spending per se appeared to drive changes in the out-of-pocket burden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how aggregate economic conditions affect the timing of marriage, and particularly child marriage, in Sub‐Saharan Africa and in India. In both regions, substantial monetary or in‐kind transfers occur with marriage: bride price across Sub‐Saharan Africa and dowry in India. In a simple equilibrium model of the marriage market in which parents choose when their children marry, income shocks affect the age of marriage because marriage payments are a source of consumption smoothing, particularly for a woman's family. As predicted by our model, we show that droughts, which reduce annual crop yields by 10 to 15% and aggregate income by 4 to 5%, have opposite effects on the marriage behavior of a sample of 400,000 women in the two regions: in Sub‐Saharan Africa they increase the annual hazard into child marriage by 3%, while in India droughts reduce such a hazard by 4%. Changes in the age of marriage due to droughts are associated with changes in fertility, especially in Sub‐Saharan Africa, and with declines in observed marriage payments. Our results indicate that the age of marriage responds to short‐term changes in aggregate economic conditions and that marriage payments determine the sign of this response. This suggests that, in order to design successful policies to combat child marriage and improve investments in daughters' human capital, it is crucial to understand the economic role of marriage market institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we look at the evolution of consumption and wage inequality from 1980 to 2016 in the US. We use data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) and the Current Population Survey (CPS) to look at differences in consumption and wages across groups in the population defined by educational attainment of the household head and year‐of‐birth cohort. We show that the results obtained by Attanasio and Davis (1996) for non‐durable consumption still hold in more recent decades. In addition to non‐durable consumption and services, we look at inequality measured in terms of expenditure on and stock of vehicles. The advantages of looking at these measures are that information on cars is typically measured more accurately than other components of expenditure and consumers are more likely to react by adjusting their stock of vehicles on the basis of long‐term expectations about their economic prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post-collectivization period, rural Chinese households were required to sell part of their grain output to the state at a below-market price; however, increases in this quota price beginning in 1993 generated substantial positive income shocks. These income shocks also varied cross-sectionally in accordance with crop composition given that quotas were systematically larger for rice-producing households, generating a quasi-random source of variation in the size of the shock driven by climatic variation in suitability for rice cultivation. Households induced to experience relatively larger income shocks show evidence of decreased agricultural investment, increased investment in non-agricultural businesses, and increased migration as households gain increased income, consistent with the hypothesis that credit constraints may have constrained some households from entering non-agricultural production ex ante. In addition, there is evidence that these households were concentrated among households who had not previously diversified out of agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• We measure permanent income shock, transitory income shock, and consumption change at household level. • We empirically study the role of self-insurance and external insurance in moderating the impact of permanent income shock and transitory income shock on consumption change in China and US. • Household assets have larger effects in increasing the household's over-smoothing on permanent income shock for Chinese households while public transfer decreases the US household's sensitivity on transitory income shock. In this letter, we measure permanent income shocks, transitory income shocks, and consumption changes at the household level to explore the role of self-insurance and external insurance in explaining the different consumption insurance patterns between Chinese households and US households. We find that household assets have larger effects on increasing the household's smoothing of permanent income shocks for Chinese households, while public transfers decrease US households' sensitivity to transitory income shocks. The role of private transfers is not statistically significant for either US or Chinese households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Household income shocks in developing countries are known to have an impact on the education investments for children. In this paper, we explore the effects of various income and expenditure shocks on educational investment and cognitive outcomes of children using three rounds of household-level panel data from Young Lives survey conducted in two southern states of India – Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. We find that idiosyncratic shocks like paternal health shocks and livestock loss translate into lower inputs of children's education, which reduce their cognitive ability captured through vocabulary and mathematics tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Volatility in commodity markets poses a distinct risk to farmers in developing countries who rely on cash crop agriculture. We combine a time series of international coffee prices with a long-running panel on coffee-growing households in Vietnam to investigate coping mechanisms employed by farmers in a transitioning economy. We find that households cope with lower coffee prices by increasing wage labor of adults, with children and adolescents substituting for adults on the farm. Heterogeneity analysis indicates a stronger substitution pattern among women, ethnic minorities, and households with fewer assets. A variety of robustness checks corroborate these findings. Account of this finding should be taken in formulating and implementing social protection and inclusive growth policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Coffee price shocks spur public land grants where coffee suitability is greater. • Organized cultivators out-compete squatters in leveraging price shocks to win land grants. • Longstanding political and economic inequality facilitate the power of organized cultivators. • Public land distribution continues to diminish national patrimony and natural spaces in many developing countries. Abstract How do commodity shocks impact the privatization of public lands? This paper examines this question through the lens of the establishment of private property rights over public lands in Colombia, which has had one of the Western Hemisphere's largest public land distribution programs during the last century. Using data on exogenous international coffee price shocks along with data on land suitability for coffee production as determined by agro-climatic conditions and roughly 250,000 public land grants, I find that coffee price increases generate more public land grants in municipalities where land is more suited to coffee production. Additional tests suggest that the findings are driven by the power of organized cultivators to steer the land grant process in their favor. The findings shed light on the role of organized actors in the countryside extending private extension of control over public territory – a phenomenon that has drastically diminished public lands and natural spaces in numerous countries over the last two centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines how property arrangements – a key determinant of rural income – influence armed conflict in the presence of commodity price shocks. Using detailed data on district level land tenure, crop produce, and conflict intensity in Peru and Colombia, estimates show that exogenous negative price shocks increase the intensity of conflict in districts with a greater presence of individual ownership, relative to other types of land tenure. The finding is consistent with small landowners in the export sector experiencing a sharper downturn in labor market outcomes thus reducing the opportunity cost of participating in insurgent groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether and how changes in economic circumstances or household income affect individuals’ diet and nutritional intakes is of substantial interest for policy purposes. This paper exploits a period of substantial income volatility in Russia to examine the extent to which , as well as how individuals protect their energy intakes in the face of unanticipated shocks to household income. Using rich data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, our results suggest that households use substitution, disproportionally cutting back spending on non-foods to protect spending on foods, change the composition of the consumption basket, and increase the consumption of ‘cheaper’ calories. Taken together, however, we find that total energy intakes as well as the nutritional composition of the diet are almost fully protected against income shocks. Specifically, we find that 12–16% of the effect of permanent income shocks on food expenditures is transmitted to energy intakes, with 84–88% protected through insurance mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we exploit a lottery in Tanzania, which randomly assigned eligible participants to receive $100 cash grants. The randomized nature of the lottery allows us to estimate the causal impact of positive income shocks on risky sexual behavior. We found that winning the lottery led men to have 0.28 (95 % CI 0.14, 0.55) more sexual partners and to a 0.21 (95 % CI 0.01-0.4) increase in the probability of unprotected sex with a non-primary partner relative to a control group of eligible non-winners. We found no significant effect of winning the lottery on the sexual behavior of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]