Essays in the economics of health and education

This dissertation consists of three chapters investigating individual responses to state-sponsored benefit programs in Mexico and the United States. The first two chapters investigate the economic effects of Mexico's Seguro Popular health insurance program, while the third looks at the educational responses of low-achieving high school students to U.S. state merit scholarships.;Chapter one evaluates the effects of Seguro Popular on household and individual level health-related consumption, health spending, health outcomes, and labor supply. First introduced in 2002, Seguro Popular provides free health care to the fifty percent of Mexican families that lack the social security protections granted to all formal sector workers in that country. The Seguro Popular program was introduced in stages, across municipalities and time. I exploit this variation and implement a modified difference-in-difference analysis to evaluate the effects of the program on a panel of households between 2002 and 2004. I find significant increases in health care utilization, but little change in spending or health outcomes. Labor supply decreased overall for secondary workers, especially young males, but older adults see a significant increase in hours worked.;Chapter two investigates the relationship between Seguro Popular and changes in formal employment in Mexico. Between 2001 and 2006, I find little evidence of correlation between Seguro Popular and the decision of workers to be employed in the formal or informal sector. The largest effects measured, for young men with less than a high school education, are on the order of less than a one percentage point drop in the share of formal employment in a region receiving Seguro Popular.;Chapter three discusses the effects of U.S. state merit scholarships on high school achievement. Introduced in a dozen states throughout the 1990s, the programs provide incentives for all high school students to improve, possibly even the lowest achievers. In this study, I measure the relationship between program implementation and changes in high school graduation rates for ten scholarship programs. I find that states with merit scholarships were experiencing negative trends in graduation rates before the programs were introduced, and that these trends tend to worsen after introduction.