Essays in public economics

his dissertation is dedicated to study government programs from different perspectives. Chapter 1 presents evidence of measurement error in the report of program participation in Food Stamps and Public Assistance in different surveys of the U.S. Measurement error is often the largest source of bias in survey data, yet little is known about the determinants of such errors, making it difficult for data producers to reduce the extent of errors and for data users to assess the validity of analyses using the data. We study different causes of survey error using high quality validation data from three major surveys in the U.S. that are linked to administrative data on government transfers. The differences between survey and administrative records show that up to six out of ten cash welfare recipients are missed by surveys. We find that survey design and post-processing as well as misreporting by respondents affect survey errors systematically. Imputation for missing data induces substantial error. Our results on respondent behavior confirm several theories of misreporting, e.g. that errors are related to salience of receipt, respondent's degree of cooperation, forward and backward telescoping, event recall, and the stigma of reporting participation in social programs. Our results provide guidance on the conditions under which survey data are likely to be accurate and suggest different ways to control for survey errors. Chapter 2 investigates whether fixed costs of adjustment as opposed to low returns explain why better quality care practices diffuse slowly in the medical industry. Using a randomized field experiment, the results show that temporary financial incentives paid to health clinics for the early initiation of prenatal care nudged providers to test and develop new data driven strategies to locate and encourage likely pregnant women to seek care in the first trimester of pregnancy. These innovations raised the rate of early initiation of prenatal care by 34% while the incentives were being paid in the treatment period. Following health clinics over time the findings illustrate that this increase persisted for at least 24 months after the incentives ended. In the absence of incentives, it is in the clinics' interest to provide better prenatal care but learning and experimenting with new methods is too costly. The temporary incentives help to overcome initial costs and increase productivity in the long run. Despite the large increases in early initiation of prenatal care, there are no effects on health outcomes. Chapter 3 explores the effects of a conditional cash transfer program in Bolivia that pays mothers between...