| dc.description.abstract | There is increasing evidence that an individual’s experiences, setting, and resource access during early childhood and education years have a profound impact on productivity, income, and health in adulthood. Understanding the magnitude and direction of early life interventions has important policy implications for many targeted public spending programs. We contribute along several dimensions to better understanding the determinants of long run labor market and health outcomes.
In Chapter I, I leverage variation in the county level variation in the timing of fluoride adoption within a county to estimate the causal effect of childhood fluoride exposure. Despite being named one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century, I find negative long run impacts as a result of community water fluoridation programs. Specifically, I find that children exposed to community water fluoridation from age zero to five experience a 1.9 percent of a standard deviation decrease in their adult economic self-sufficiency and a 1.2 percent of a standard deviation decrease in physical ability and health.
In Chapter II, we examine the effect of providing benefits in-kind versus in cash. We leverage a policy in Puerto Rico that converted cash benefits to in-kind nutritional assistance, holding benefit generosity constant. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that providing the benefits in-kind led to significant increases in food consumption and decreases in maternal anemia, and resulted in long run improvements in adolescent health.
Shifting the focus to post-secondary education years, in Chapter III we estimate the causal impact of access to financial aid. We overcome endogeneity concerns by leveraging the elimination of the Social Security Student Benefit Program. We use a large sample of administrative Social Security records to precisely identify individuals impacted by the elimination of the program and link these individual records to Census Bureau survey data. Preliminary results show that eligible students received an average of over $7,000 dollars in financial assistance which resulted in 0.185 increased years of education but no statistically significant causal impact on long run labor market or health outcomes. | |
