Three essays in health economics and labor economics

There are three essays in this dissertation. The first two explore the effect of maternal employment on family well being. The third essay explores the effect of academic department quality on publication productivity.;The purpose of Essay One is to explore the effect of the timing of maternal employment on childhood and adolescence overweight and obesity, and examine the possible mechanisms, such as diet, physical activity, and TV viewing, using longitudinal data from the NICHD Study on Early Child Care (SECC). The baseline LPM results show that maternal employment during elementary school increases the probability of childhood and adolescent obesity by 12-15%. After controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, however, the magnitude of the adverse effect of maternal employment on children's obesity decreases. Physical activity and TV viewing appear to be mechanisms through which maternal employment affects children's bodyweight.;Essay Two uses longitudinal data from the NICHD Study on Early Child Care (SECC) to examine the effects of maternal employment on family well-being, measured by maternal mental and overall health, parenting stress, and parenting quality. We use dynamic panel data models to examine the effects of maternal employment on family outcomes during the first 4.5 years of children's lives. We find that maternal work hours are associated with maternal health, and no evidence that maternal employment is associated with parenting stress and quality.;In Essay Three, I used SDR data to establish the existence of the increasing inequality in publication productivity, examined the effect of the quality of the academic department on publication productivity, and found that that effect decreases over time and therefore does not contribute to the increasing inequality. Furthermore, one characteristic of the academic department marginally significantly affects the publication productivity, the Gini coefficient for publications, which suggests that the faculty who works in an academic department with lower inequality of publication publishes more than a faculty in other academic departments.