An evaluation of Argentina's Jefes y Jefas de Hogar public employment program

This dissertation concerns the use of public employment as an anti-poverty measure following Argentina's 2001--2002 economic collapse. All three chapters focus on Argentina's Jefes y Jefas de Hogar social safety net employment program.;The first chapter addresses the program's unexpectedly high proportion of partnered female applicants, which had caused the government some concern insofar as many of these workers had not previously been counted among the unemployed, and their participation thus did little to lower the official unemployment rate. I estimate a structurally derived multinomial probit model of application to Jefas, and find that individuals' opportunity costs of time were strongly correlated with the potential to earn income in market employment, with the result that the optimal enrollee in a household was often a female "secondary earner," who had inferior access to the labor market. I also show that public schooling likely played an important role in enabling women to enroll in Jefas.;The second chapter addresses how changes to the design of Jefas would have affected the gender composition and poverty levels of applicants. In particular, I use the reservation wages estimated in the previous chapter to estimate the effect of two hypothetical changes: removal of the "one person per household" rule, and perfect enforcement of the requirement that applicants be primary earners who lost their jobs during the crisis. Counterfactuals are based on weighted averages of characteristics, using probabilities predicted by a probit model of participation. I find that in terms of the overall goal of the heads of household program, which was to reduce poverty given a limited budget, it does not appear that any of the potential changes outlined in this paper would significantly improve performance, nor would allowing enrollment by more than one member of a household have significantly changed applicants' gender composition.;The third chapter evaluates Jefes' impact on child labor and school attendance, using a comparison group of children whose parents applied to the program but did not receive benefits. I develop both parametric and semiparametric estimates of the program's impact, which require different assumptions, and reveal different information about the relationship between the treatment and outcomes of interest. Using cross-sectional and longitudinal data, I find that children age 10--14 whose parents enrolled in the Jefas program and received benefits were less likely to report working by around 1.3 percentage points, and more likely to report attending school by approximately 2.0 percentage points, compared with similar children whose parents were not enrolled.