CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Bárdits, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays in Labor and Health Economics |
| Summary | The thesis consists of one single-authored and two jointly-authored chapters, that are linked by their focus on investigating causal questions with high policy relevance in the fields of labor and health economics. All chapters use large Hungarian datasets for the empirical analyses. The first chapter (joint with Anna Adamecz, Márta Bisztray, Ágnes Szabó-Morvai, and Andrea Weber) studies fertility responses to employment shocks (firm closures and mass layoffs) and shows that the main response happens in anticipation of the shock. Responses differ by the availability of dismissal protection. While pregnancies increase in anticipation of all events, births only rise in case of mass layoffs when pregnant women are protected from layoffs. If the firm closes protection is lost and we find an increase in abortions. We interpret these results as evidence for precautionary fertility behavior. Women threatened by job displacement bring births forward to exploit dismissal protection, a strategy that breaks down if the firm closes permanently. The second chapter (joint with Gábor Kertesi) investigates how the type of home environment -- family foster care or residential care -- affects the adult outcomes of individuals who were raised in state care during adolescence. We find that young adults who grew up in family foster care are more likely to finish secondary education, they spend less time without either working or studying, and they are less likely to use tranquilizers than comparable youth raised in residential care. For girls, teenage pregnancy is less likely. These findings suggest that policies that increase the share of children who are placed into foster care have to potential to substantially improve the outcomes of children who live in state care. The third chapter investigates the effect of physical education (PE) time on the body composition of students, using a new outcome, body fat percentage. The estimated effects of past PE time on body fat percentage and obesity are statistically insignificant and close to zero. The findings indicate that increasing PE time alone is not sufficient to tackle childhood obesity. |
| Supervisor | Szeidl, Ádám |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/bardits_anna.pdf |
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