We examine the response of rural Ugandan households to a large aggregate shock, the Covid-19 pandemic, during and one year after the. rst lockdown in March 2020. Using 6 rounds of phone surveys from 558 households in western Uganda, we fi nd that household
income recovery from the lockdown di ers by whether households had a business
pre-pandemic. After an initial sharp fall, the incomes of those without a business have
recovered to pre-pandemic levels. However, the relatively better-o. households with a
business before the pandemic still have one-third lower income, due to sustained closure of businesses even after the end of the. rst lockdown restrictions. Additionally,
business-owning households have 30% lower wealth one-year into the pandemic, driven by 44% lower assets, 45% drop in savings, and a 15 fold increase in net-borrowing, suggesting long-term damage. With Covid-19 causing a continued threat, our. findings point to the
need to support households who face dwindling. nances to fall back on.

Pakistan has gender parity in tertiary enrollment yet labor force participation rate of female graduates is one-third that of the male graduates. We conducted a randomised
control trial with 2500 final year female undergraduate students in Lahore, Pakistan, a large majority of whom had expressed a desire to work after graduation. We randomly selected half of the sample to watch videos of successful relatable female role models to encourage students to enter the labor force. We collected high frequency, phone survey data up to 18 months after the intervention. The treated students had a significantly
higher growth mindset immediately after watching the video. However, this did not translate into significantly higher job search effort or likelihood of working for the first 15 months after the intervention. Eighteen months after the intervention, at the onset of the first nationwide COVID-19 lockdown, treated students were 4.7 ercentage points more likely to be working. This result was driven by respondents who belonged to households with lower income and parental education at baseline, possibly due to greater likelihood of a primary earner in their household becoming unemployed after the lockdown, and being more stressed about the loss of household income.