Public day care centers in Chile have increased in 240% between 2005 and 2007. This paper uses this huge increase in public day care supply for infants of poor families to analyze its impact on Female Labor Force Participation. The magnitude of the expansion is used as a quasi-natural...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>

In a developing economy with an ethnically diverse society, such as India's, household welfare and its distribution within the household unambiguously depend on how much time each member of the household spends on productive activity. In this paper we examine the welfare impact of reducing the...

In 1996, the Chilean government approved the extension of the school day, increasing the amount of time that students spend at school by 30%. Using data from the Chilean socio- economic household survey and administrative data from the Ministry of Education for 1990- 2006, we exploit the...

Few works have examined the relationship between maternal participation in the labor force and the availability of child care in developing countries. Existing papers also tend to rely on relatively simplistic, correlative analysis of the data rather than modeling the joint decision to invest in...

We investigate whether taxpayers respond to a large, ACA-induced upward tax notch at the Federal Poverty Level. Using administrative tax data, we document bunching in the income distribution and provide estimates of the taxable income elasticity. Our estimates are the only ones using US data...

The Zimbabwean nation has been struggling to gain economic development momentum in the multicurrency era despite numerous efforts being made by policy makers. The economy has since operated with budget deficits and high consumption expenditures in the form of wages for civil servants and little...

In this paper we show that investments to improve the supply and management of water reduce the time spent in fetching water by both men and women, which in turn will lead to a reallocation of the time saved to productive activities, and result in increased incomes. Using the national ARIS/REDS...

Most U.S. criminal defendants are represented by government-employed public defenders (PDs). PDs consistently face higher caseloads than recommended by professional guidelines, but systematic evidence of the impacts of excessive workloads on defendants is lacking. This paper uses novel...

Little literature currently exists on the effects of childcare use on maternal labor market outcomes in a developing country context, and the few recent studies offer mixed results. We attempt to fill these gaps by analyzing several latest rounds of the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey...