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IZA Discussion Paper No. 17782
March 2025
A Comment on “Improving Women’s Mental Health During a Pandemic”
Abel Brodeur, Lenka Fiala, Jack Fitzgerald, Essi Kujansuu, David Valenta, Ole Rogeberg, Gunther Bensch

Vlassopoulos et al. (2024) find that after providing two hours of telephone counseling over three months, a sample of Bangladeshi women saw significant reductions in stress and depression after ten months. We find three anomalies. First, estimates are almost entirely driven by reverse-scored survey items, which are handled inconsistently both in the code and in the field. Second, participants in this experiment are reused from multiple prior experiments conducted by the paper’s authors, and estimates are extremely sensitive to the experiment from which participants originate. Finally, inconsistencies and irregularities in raw survey files raise doubts about the data.

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Christina Gathmann
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The IZA@LISER Network is a global community of scholars dedicated to excellence in labor economics and related fields, now coordinated at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) following its transition from Bonn.

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