Three Essays On Public Policy And Human Development

The Ph D thesis is composed of three chapters.In the first chapter,I study the impact of a hypothetical tax on sugar-sweetened beverages(SSBs)on the U.S.households' nutrients purchase,welfare change,and health benefit.Differently from the traditional approach,Food at Home(FAH)is here defined as a “home”good instead of a market good and consumers' demands derived under the assumption that households maximize utility subject to both a money and a time constraint.The model is estimated by using an incomplete approximate Exact Affine Stone Index(EASI)demand system on a data set built by merging the U.S.consumer expenditure and time use surveys.Results show that a SSB tax would be much more effective in decreasing household nutrients purchase than it would appear by estimating a model neglecting time costs in home food production,due to a lesser compensation of calorie is from increasing FAH consumption.A tax-induced 38% increase in SSB price is predicted to decrease the per capita energy purchase by 41kcal/day.In the second Chapter,I investigate the long-run effects of a poverty alleviation resettlement(PAR)experiment launched in 1994 on the development of children at the time of resettlement using pilot data.The PAR project is a government-sponsored voluntary resettlement aimed to alleviate poverty and provide better opportunities for children in poor villages.I find that the resettlement has different impact across gender.The girls are worse off both in terms of education outcome,as measured by rank of GPA one-year after the resettlement,senior high school entrance exam participation and attendance,school dropout,and individual earnings.Boys are less likely to be affected by the PAR experiment,but their earnings in adulthood are worse than those in the control group.Overall,the results of the PAR experiment are not positive,for which I provide some possible explanations.First,people in the treated group are simply resettled to a designated area.A “one to many” relocation with multiple choices might be better.Second,the PAR program might have short-term benefits for immediately improve people's living condition but the long-term impact could be negative because of constrained choice of employment and location-specific skill accumulation that later can become less beneficial.Third,there might be heterogenous impact not only across gender,but also along other dimensions that need to be taken into consideration in research and policy making.In the third chapter,by using a larger sample data,I first explore the overall impact.Consistent with the chapter 2,I find Boshan PAR has a negative impacts on children's development.Further,I investigates the heterogeneous impacts across children's educational stages.I divide children into four groups at the Boshan PAR –preschool stage,primary school stage,junior high school stage,and senior high school and above.I find that there is a polarization effects in education for the resettled children relative to the control ones.The hard working /talented children benefit from the resettlement,while the average-score children get worse off and are less likely to continue study after the 9-year compulsory education.This result holds for the pooling sample and children in junior high school at the PAR.(In addition,for the children in heterogenous educational stages,I find the PAR decrease the younger children(in preschool at PAR)'s willingness to study,while it has almost no impact on senior-high school children)The polarization effects in education is driven by the improvement in educational resources,however,easy accessibility of jobs after the PAR.Regarding to the returns to schooling,I find that PAR has almost no impact on treatment children's income in adulthood.Further,I investigate the PAR experiment on career selection using a location-task-specific human capital.I find that older children tend to be more sticky to the destination place,as measured by task-specific job distance and geographic job distance.