Three essays on social effects of public policies in emerging countries

This dissertation consists of three essays using data from emerging economies to examine the effects of policies on three human development indicators: labor force participation, child health and education. Each essay examines the secondary effects of public policies, that is, "bonus" effects that are not the primary objective of those policies.;In chapter one, I examine the effect of a 240% increase in the number of Chilean public daycare centers for poor infants on the female labor force participation. Due to its geographic and social heterogeneity, the expansion provides a quasi-natural experiment. Using mean differences I find a positive effect on the expansion of the female labor force participation, which coincides with previous findings for Chile. However, after controlling for observable individual and family characteristics, I no longer find a socially or statistically significant effect on the labor force participation, employment or hours of work of eligible mothers.;In chapter two, using the 1993 South Africa Integrated Household Survey, we study the effect of mother's education on her children's health. We find that a four-year increase in mother's education is associated with a one-centimeter increase in child's height. This relation remains when we control for household and community resources, suggesting that the mechanism is the mother's increased knowledge. We also find support for the common hypothesis that mother's education is more important for children older than 24 months.;In chapter three, I use alternative measures of neighborhood quality to study its impact on student performance in school. The Chilean voucher-based education system allows me to test separately for neighborhood and traditional in-classroom peer effects. I use the Human Development Index reported by United Nations, and the relative number of books in public libraries at the county level, to measure neighborhood quality. For the whole sample I find a positive neighborhood effect. The fact that the effect remains when I look at a sample of random movers makes me less confident that the relation is causal. However, the final specification shows that the school county neighborhood indicator remains significant, while the home county indicator appears to be non-significant. Hence, I looks like the home county indicator is picking up the school county characteristics.