This dissertation contains three chapters that study the impact of a labor market policy onnursing home staffing and patient outcomes, the impact of parental divorce on long-term market outcomes, and the impact of a change in housing wealth on children’s schooling decisions. Chapter one examines the effect of paid sick leave mandates on nursing home outcomes, with a focus on low-paid nursing staff. I use the synthetic control group method and traditional difference-in-differences models along with Nursing Home Compare data and Vital Statistics microdata to estimate the causal effect of paid sick leave mandates on nursing home outcomes. I find significant increases in part-time nursing assistant staffing and resident health and safety improvements. Nursing homes in areas with sick pay mandates also show reductions in the elderly mortality rate. Nursing assistant hours per resident day increase by 2.3 percent driven by a 12 percent increase in the hours for part-time workers, and there are no significant reductions in hours of full-time nursing assistants. I find improvements along multiple measures of patient health and safety. My calculations show that sick pay mandates helped prevent at least 4000 nursing home deaths per year among the elderly. Chapter two explores the importance of divorce in explaining the gender gap in children’s long-term educational outcomes. I find large differences in the gender gap between divorced and non-divorced families. Boys perform much worse in divorced families. I use a sibling fixed effects model to find that boys in divorced families have a lower likelihood of graduating high school and attending college relative to their sisters. My results show that boys’ likelihood of graduating high school declines by 6.4 percentage points if their parents are divorced before they turn 13, and their chances of attending college decline by 12.2 percentage points if they are a teenager at the time of divorce. I find that parents’ divorce is unrelated to the gender gap in achievement scores. My event study models show a drop in boys’ achievement scores relative to girls around the time of divorce. Chapter three examines the effect of housing wealth changes on private school enrolment. I use data from The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth’s child supplement to examine the relationship between housing wealth and private school enrolment. I use a multinomial logit model and find that self-reported housing price changes increase the likelihood that respondents switch from private to public school. Heterogeneity analyses reveal that house price increases have a positive relationship between switching from private to public school across income, gender, race, and religion. Finally, a rise in house prices increases the likelihood that a child moves from public school to private school when transitioning from middle school to private school.
Read
