This dissertation consists of two chapters. First, I explore the role health dynamics play in determining the value and cost-effectiveness of public health insurance. Current healthcare consumption may yield future health benefits that lower longer-run expenditures. I leverage exogenous variation in the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to assess how comprehensive insurance affects immediate healthcare spending for the near-elderly (aged 60-64) and future healthcare spending once they receive Medicare at age 65. I provide evidence that Medicaid coverage increases immediate expenditures by roughly 112 percent; but, after receiving Medicare, the same individuals are healthier and consume 77 percent less care measured by total expenditures. I then develop and estimate a life-cycle model of near-elderly individuals that incorporates the Medicaid expansions as well as dynamic health investment and endogenous mortality. I find that the Medicaid expansions were valued by the near-elderly population at slightly above net government costs, and that modest reforms to increase Medicare's generosity could generate considerable welfare improvements relative to program costs. Second, I document that flexible employment and educational arrangements can reduce the barriers that some students face in seeking a degree by mitigating the contemporaneous earnings losses associated with enrolling in college. Using detailed data, I analyze how labor supply and study efforts respond to changes in labor market conditions and college activities/tasks. My findings indicate a low ``short run" opportunity cost of studying when working. I also show that study time is not particularly sensitive to changes in labor market conditions. Consistent with these results, I find that workers take advantage of their flexible schedules by changing their usual working hours when their college courses are more demanding. Encouragingly, I do not find adverse effects of work hours on academic performance or of study hours on workplace performance. Finally, students value flexible working and educational formats highly and view online education as an important vehicle for increasing expected future income. Overall, this study underscores that combining flexible working and learning formats constitutes a suitable path for many students who work to pay for college or workers who aim to improve their skills.

The welfare consequences of price versus quantity-based regulation are known to differ when information about marginal benefits or costs of abatement is imperfect. Does uncertainty about demand for the polluting good also matter for welfare of these two approaches to regulation? In chapter 1, I use plant-level survey data and high frequency variation in power consumption to assess the dynamic implications of uncertainty about future demand for the relative welfare consequences of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade regulation. I address this question in the context of the electricity sector where demand risk is particularly salient. I show that the choice between policy instruments depends on how firms and consumers balance unpredictable output volatility (higher with carbon taxes) vs. price volatility (higher with cap-and-trade regulation). Over a wide range of policy-relevant abatement targets, I find carbon taxes outperform cap-and-trade in terms of welfare. Financial incentives like the Production Tax Credit are central initiatives behind wind power as the leading renewable energy source in the U.S. But do institutional design features of energy markets matter for cost-effectiveness of subsidies to wind investments? In chapter 2, I answer this question by investigating how the design of procurement contracts that are typically used by wind developers affects their investment incentives. Using unit-level data from wind farm production and installed capacity, I find that structuring subsidies based on key features of the type of procurement contracts associated to wind projects leads to major reductions in public expenditures in terms of subsidy payments to wind developers without undermining their investment incentives. The U.S. federal government is known to have a history of heavily subsidizing the wind power industry. Subsidies either to output (Production Tax Credit) or investment goods (Investment Tax Credit) have been critical to replace emissions-intensive technologies with wind power. Which type of subsidy is best to incentivize wind investments at the least cost? In chapter 3, I use plant-level data of wind facilities from the Texas electricity market to develop and estimate a model of investment decisions that accounts for productivity shocks at the wind farm level and prudent behavior of developers. I find that subsidizing production can increase average yearly investment rates in wind capacity up to 2.5 percentage points over mean investment rates under alternative subsidies to capital. This is driven by precautionary savings that developers accumulate to smooth out potential future shocks to investment income when adverse weather conditions lead to low subsidy payments.

Are heterogeneous labor market outcomes a product of markets efficiently allocating resources or the result of structural market failures which should be corrected through well-crafted policy? In order to address this fundamental question in modern economics, we must first understand the forces which shape individuals' earnings, employment, and occupational choices. This collection of essays provides new evidence to support several novel channels which influence labor markets. First, I evaluate the connection between technological change and labor market outcomes by bringing new data and methods to study the mechanization of American agriculture in the early 20th century. Using an instrumental variables estimation strategy, I find that exogenous increases in exposure to technological change generated occupational displacement for incumbent laborers, increased income inequality, and had important impacts on intergenerational mobility for the children of affected workers. Additionally, I investigate the connection between low-opportunity neighborhoods and public housing residents' labor market outcomes. Leveraging quasi-random variation in neighborhood quality due to a public housing demolition, I find that residents' wages increased after moving to higher-opportunity neighborhoods and that more intense supportive services improved post-move employment. Taken together, these essays provide new evidence that both large-scale factors like new technologies and local factors like neighborhood quality contribute to heterogeneity in labor market outcomes both historically and up to the present day.

This dissertation explores the effect of school competition on the human capital accumulation of students. Policies that expand the scope for school choice have become increasingly popular largely due to the belief that this will create incentives for low-performing, incumbent schools to improve academic outcomes. However, there is a general lack of empirical support for these positive academic spillover effects in most contexts. In the first chapter, I demonstrate that if schools respond to competition through channels not typically considered in standard arguments in favor of school choice, it means that these policies may lead to negative, unintended consequences for academic achievement. I find that increasing the number of schools serving a given market can have a negative effect on test scores through creating incentives for schools to increase the provision of non-academic services that do not contribute to academic preparation, and through the creation of excess costs in the public school system. I use an empirical strategy designed to address strategic location decisions by new entrants as well as student selection across schools to show that entry of a new charter middle school during a recent large-scale charter expansion in North Carolina decreased average traditional public middle school test scores across a school district. The second chapter considers the extent to which policymakers have tools available to them that can improve the ability of competition to generate the increases in test scores at incumbent schools that they have prioritized. I show that the efficacy of school choice can be improved by providing short-term, partial reimbursements to public school districts for increases in charter school enrollment by resident pupils. I also demonstrate that these effects occur not only due to the direct increase in district revenue associated with reimbursements, but also because the presence of this aid reduces the incentives of school administrators to compete for students through non-academic channels. The empirical strategy that I use to generate these results leverages plausibly exogenous cutoffs for aid eligibility induced by a unique policy in the state of New York.

The presence of children can influence importantly how households respond to income risk. The aim of this dissertation is to study how different aspects of families' life-cycle decisions are affected by different sources of income fluctuation. In the first part of this dissertation, I study the relationships between fertility choices, consumption, and labor supply, by developing a model with endogenous fertility decisions and income volatility. Within this framework, fertility choices act as a mechanism to smooth utility over time. In this context, I analyze the insurance value of fertility choices. I use a structural model that combines two features underexplored by the literature: children as consumption commitments, and nonseparabilities of family size and consumption. Having children in the household affects consumption and labor marginal utilities, changing the insurance value of fertility decisions and generating incentives to avoid childbearing during low-income spells. I find that the welfare loss of a negative transitory income shock is 34 to 38 times larger if households are not able to choose when to have their children. These results underscore how costly unplanned childbearing can be to the household in terms of welfare.The second part of this dissertation evaluates the impact of being born under negative conditions in the labor market on human capital formation, and what parental behavior could be leading to those effects. I estimate the impact of the unemployment rates on children's assessment outcomes in cognitive and noncognitive skills. Counterintuitively, the results suggest that higher unemployment rates are linked to positive child development outcomes later in childhood. In my main specification, an increase of 1 percentage point in state unemployment causes an increase of 2.5% of a standard deviation in cognitive test scores after controlling for income at birth, hours worked at birth, and other variables.

Amid the fast-growing market of plant-based alternatives to conventional meat, there still lies uncertainty about consumers’ preferences for these new products. Through an online survey using a Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism, I test the effect that environmental information provision has on consumers’ immediate and long-term willingness- to-pay for the Whopper and Impossible Whopper from Burger King. Respondents were randomly assigned to either a control group or a treatment group, and both received information on taste in an attempt to isolate the effect of environmental information. Results show that certain groups respond to the information differently. Specifically, consumers who care about climate change are affected greatly by environmental in- formation suggesting these “climate advocates” are not fully informed despite the efforts of Impossible Foods. Vegetarians and highly educated individuals have relatively stronger preferences for the plant-based burger, in line with previous studies. Results also show a lasting effect of information on WTP, suggesting little need for repeated interventions.

This survey takes information on a participant’s beliefs on privacy security, the general digital knowledge, demographics, and willingness-to-pay points on if they would delete information on their social media, to see how an information treatment affects those payment points. This information treatment is meant to make half of the participants think about the deeper ramifications of the information they reveal. The initial hypothesis is that this information will make people want to pay more to remove their information from the web, but the results find a surprising negative correlation with the treatment.

Prior research on consumer behavior in health insurance markets has primarily focused on individual decision making while relying on strong parametric assumptions about preferences. The aim of this dissertation is to improve the traditional approach in both dimensions. First, I consider the importance of joint decision-making in individual insurance markets by studying how married couples coordinate their choices in these markets. Second, I investigate the robustness of prior studies by developing a non-parametric method to assess decision-making in health insurance markets. To study how married couples make choices in individual insurance markets I estimate a stochastic choice model of household demand that takes into account spouses' risk aversion, spouses' expenditure risk, risk sharing, and switching costs. I use the model estimates to study how coordination within couples and interaction between couples and singles affects the way that markets adjust to policies designed to nudge consumers toward choosing higher value plans, particularly with respect to adverse selection.

Finally, to assess consumer decision-making beyond standard parametric assumptions about preferences, I use second--order stochastic dominance rankings. Moreover, I show how to extend this method to construct bounds on the welfare implications of choosing dominated plans.

Environmental regulations such as carbon taxation and air quality standards can lead to notable improvements in health outcomes and ambient air quality. However, these types of policies may have significant impacts on the labor market, in particular for workers in energy-intensive industries, especially if these workers have acquired specific human capital in those industries. This dissertation focuses on the general equilibrium consequences of environmental regulation on the labor market. Specifically, I examine costly reallocation of workers between sectors, the welfare effects of involuntary unemployment, and the heterogeneous effects of this policy on different types of workers. To this end, I develop a two-sector search model with sectoral human capital accumulation to explore the effects on the labor market of implementing a per unit of energy use carbon tax in the US. I separate the economy into a high-intensive sector (’dirty’) and a low-intensive sector (’clean’). I calibrate the model using 2014 U.S. data. I find that a carbon tax increases total unemployment by 0.06 percentage points, decreases the dirty employment rate by 2.1 percent, and increases the clean employment rate by 1.04 percent. Firms in the dirty sector adjust by decreasing the demand for high-skilled workers and increasing the number of vacancies in the low-skilled market

Minimum wage legislation has always been a controversial topic within the fields of politics and economics. There are those who support it under the belief that those affected will be better off, seeing increased wages, greater efficiency, and overall economic prosperity, whereas its opponents argue against it under the belief that it could lead to negative effects such as decreased employment, higher prices, and loss of productivity. This is something that has recently come up in Arizona after the enactment of Proposition 206 (Prop.206), a law which is set to raise the state minimum wage from $8.05 in 2016 to $12.00 by 2020. In this paper, rather than taking a political stance, however, we seek to find answers about the real effects that this minimum wage law has had on wage earners through the manner in which it has affected the state’s wage distribution, meaning the percentage of earners making a certain hourly rate, or between a certain wage range (i.e. $10.00 to $10.50). We begin this search by looking at May Wage Estimates offered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). From that data, we created wage distributions for the state of Arizona for the years 2011-2018. These showed us what percentage of workers in the state are making a certain hourly rate based on the total number of employees in Arizona. By summarizing this through tables and histograms, we can also visually see the way in which AZ wage distributions have changed over time. However, we also sought to visually compare the AZ wage distributions with that of nearby states, so we also used wage distribution data from Nevada, Utah, and New Mexico. Finally, we also wanted to quantify the fixed effects of enacting the legislation in the state of AZ. To do so we ran a difference-in-differences analysis that gave us an actual value measuring how recent minimum wage increases have affected the percentage of total wage earning less than $11.40 per hour. We discovered that our results, although not extremely significant (due to available data), do strongly indicate that the recent minimum wage legislation in AZ has increased the percentage of workers earning more than that amount per hour. Following that, we also give recommendations that could improve the results found in this report.