Essays on health and education

This dissertation is composed of three essays. The common thread running across them is that all of them attempt to provide empirical evidence to guide policy decisions in the specific areas of health and education.;The first two chapters analyze the effects of a large-scale health intervention in Mexico. In 2002 the Mexican government began a very large expansion of government-funded healthcare for the poor - specifically, people not employed in the formal sector. The program's name is Seguro Popular (SP), which means Popular Insurance. Its final objective is to cover half of the total national population, 50 million people. Due to financial and infrastructure constraints, the program was rolled out sequentially across different areas in Mexico. The first two chapters of the dissertation use the variation in program intensity over time and space induced by the roll-out to estimate its impacts.;The first chapter, "Wealthier But Not Much Healthier: Effects of a Health Insurance Program for the Poor in Mexico", estimates the program's effects on household expenditure, health status, and labor marker outcomes. It uses repeated cross sections of household survey data and a triple difference equation that compares the gap between people in the informal sector (eligible for SP) and those in the formal sector (ineligible for SP) across states where the program intensity has evolved differently over time. It finds that the program substantially reduced out-of-pocket health expenditures of beneficiaries and caused them to shift from private to public providers. However, the program had a negligible effect on the health of beneficiaries, perhaps because the quality of care was low. The program also had no effect on labor force participation or earnings. One worry among policymakers is that Seguro Popular might induce workers to shift into the informal sector. I find no evidence of this effect. The low quality of care provided under SP, while reducing the welfare gains to beneficiaries, may have prevented the unintended consequence of encouraging movement into the informal sector.;The second chapter, "Health Reform and Infant Health: the Effects of the Mexican Seguro Popular", analyzes the effects of the Seguro Popular program on infant health and infant mortality. It uses double difference equations estimated on panel data at the state level. I find suggestive evidence indicating that the program improved medical care of births. However, the program had no effect on child mortality. The evidence on the effect of SP on infant health status is mixed: the program led to a significant improvement on a parentally-assessed health index but had no impact on the parentally-assessed incidence of health problems.;The third chapter, "The Effect of College Quality on Academic Performance: Evidence from Mexico", was jointly written with Alejandrina Salcedo. It estimates the effects of attending a higher quality campus at the college level on academic outcomes, using the case of UNAM, a large public university in Mexico. Incoming students from high schools run by the University are allocated to majors and campuses in UNAM based on a score. The score depends on the student's academic performance in high school, and the assignment mechanism gives priority to students with higher scores. The allocation process generates a series of discontinuities where students with similar scores are assigned to different campuses due to capacity constraints. This allows us to use a regression discontinuity methodology to estimate the effects of attending a higher quality campus. We find that attending a higher quality campus significantly improves peer characteristics. However, it does not significantly affect graduation probabilities or GPA, it increases the number of failed and dropped courses, and lowers the ranking by GPA of a student in her class.