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Thornton, Rebecca Thornton, Rebecca Kleemans, Marieke Powers, Elizabeth Akresh, Richard Cantet, Natalia 2020-08-26T23:57:20Z 2020-08-26T23:57:20Z 2022-08-26T23:58:55Z 2020-04-30 2020-05 Policy decision-making increasingly relies on rigorous evaluations of public interventions. As governments worldwide face social pressures to simultaneously take care of the most vulnerable and be fiscally responsible, assessing the effectiveness and efficiency of public policies is recognized as an important tool. To accomplish such goal, the field of applied economics offers many methodological approaches to estimate the causal impact of policies. In this thesis, I present three self contained empirical papers that asses the impact of governmental interventions or study the impact of common behaviors that may have significant policy implications. In chapter 2, I study the effects of effects of teenage pregnancy on education and early labor force participation of urban South African women. In chapter 3, I exploit a nation wide reform that eliminated school fees in Ethiopia to examine the effects of maternal education on child health. The two chapters are linked by the creation of similar methodological framework. The two papers are also tied together through the study of motherhood-related topics. In chapter 2, early motherhood is looked at as a cause for the later outcomes. In contrast, in chapter 3 I focus on how human capital investments leads to increases in child health. I shift from the link between education and health to the pathways through which income affects health in chapter 4. I explore the impact of a pension program that target elderly individuals on mental health and overall wellbeing in rural Nigeria. Although the population of interest in this chapter is quite different, the chapter shares a key characteristic with the third chapter in that both analyze government policies that aim at improving the welfare of a vulnerable group of people. Submission published under a 24 month embargo labeled 'U of I Access', the embargo will last until 2022-05-01 The student, Natalia Cantet, accepted the attached license on 2020-04-29 at 15:06. The student, Natalia Cantet, submitted this Dissertation for approval on 2020-04-29 at 15:17. This Dissertation was approved for publication on 2020-04-30 at 17:08. DSpace SAF Submission Ingestion Package generated from Vireo submission #15120 on 2020-08-25 at 17:28:29 Made available in DSpace on 2020-08-26T23:57:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 CANTET-DISSERTATION-2020.pdf: 1286397 bytes, checksum: 3a000c8ce89a2e30e5692bb9573d88f4 (MD5) LICENSE.txt: 4211 bytes, checksum: 1128598e2c7caad0656cf489201f2f8b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2020-04-30 Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 115748 Lift date: 2022-08-26T23:57:28Z Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system Embargo set by: Seth Robbins for item 115748 Lift date: 2022-08-26T23:58:55Z Reason: Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system Author requested U of Illinois access only (OA after 2yrs) in Vireo ETD system U of I Only application/pdf http://hdl.handle.net/2142/108136 en 2020 Natalia Cantet Education Health Essays on health and education in development economics text Thesis Economics Economics University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.