Essays on Public Policy and Household Insecurities

Download or read book Essays on Public Policy and Household Insecurities written by Kaitlyn Margaret Sims and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I ask how public policy does and does not support people at critical inflection points in their lives. Security and safety are necessary conditions for mental, physical, and emotional well-being. Chapters 1 and 2 explore how different forms of domestic insecurity -- homelessness, poverty, and family violence -- affect the way people live their lives and prepare for the future. The final chapter pivots to instead consider the public health implications of agricultural development and how policymakers might respond to support particularly vulnerable populations. All of my work is particularly interested in the mechanisms behind behavioral responses to policy, which proves challenging when solely using the tools of economics. Although I am trained as an economist, my work lies in several interdisciplinary junctures. While I try to maintain humility about my own relative expertise in these spaces, I bring my training as an economist in causal inference and population-level data to these difficult questions. My scholarship is informed by knowledge and frameworks across psychology, demography, and sociology, especially as they relate to trauma and security. In the first essay, I examine the effects of multidimensional property rights on investment in children's education. Homelessness, specifically doubling-up, has been a major concern on Chile for decades. The Chilean subsidized housing program offers access to homes and mortgages at low rates, but full housing rights are conditional on living in the home for five years. I take advantage of this conditional housing policy to disentangle the effects of housing use rights (the ability to live in the home) and transfer rights (the ability to sell the home) on investment in children's education. I develop a theoretical framework for understanding how housing transfer rights are distinct from the security effects offered by use rights. I find that there are indeed distinct effects of housing use rights and transfer rights, with both increasing educational outcomes for children of beneficiaries. However, the effects of use rights are more salient for finishing secondary school, while transfer rights affect university education, likely reflecting the high financial costs of attending university in Chile. While this study considers the context of public housing in Chile, it has implications for housing and education policy globally. As urbanization increases across the globe, my research provides necessary understanding of the different dimensions of property rights in an urban context. Further, policymakers in urban contexts often turn toward rent assistance (such as the United States Section 8 housing voucher) to address housing insecurity for families in poverty. My findings in this paper suggest that such rent assistance programs -- which offer use rights without the possibility of transfer rights -- should improve high school graduation rates, but will not have effects on costly university attendance. In the second essay, I consider an alternative public housing policy type -- emergency shelter for victims of domestic violence (DV). Victims of domestic and intimate partner violence (IPV) frequently identify the need for safe and secure housing as one of their most pressing concerns, leading to a (sometimes) robust network of services across the country aiming to support victims' housing needs. Emergency shelters, which provide short term (usually 14-90 days) housing for individuals fleeing violence, are a popular type of support services for victims, yet their efficacy remains under-evaluated in light of insufficient data. Further, our ability to speak to the mechanisms by which emergency shelters may affect broader patterns of violence is limited by the current game theoretic literature on domestic violence. In this chapter, I contribute to this literature through the collection of such a database and creation of such a theoretical framework. The theoretical framework underscores how complicated the causal links between increased shelter capacity and DV/IPV homicide are, and I argue that this ambiguous relationship in the aggregate is likely a function of community- and individual-level characteristics. I find a precisely estimated zero effect of changes to shelter capacity on both DV and IPV homicide, and this relationship is persistent across a series of robustness tests and alternative specifications. Informed by the model, I interpret this as suggestive that on the aggregate, shelter capacity limitations are not the binding constraint affecting homicide rates. Instead, it is possible that shelters are already efficiently allocating scarce bed spaces to those at the highest risk for homicide. In the third essay, co-authored with Dr. Marin Elisabeth Skidmore and Dr. Holly K. Gibbs, we investigate indirect health effects of agricultural development in the Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado. Brazil has rapidly become the world's leading soy producer in recent decades. There has been much research on the effects of extensification of soy production (increased area under cultivation) but less on the effects of intensification (use of inputs like agrotoxins), despite the identified link between pesticide exposure and carcinogenesis. We estimate the effects of the expansion of soy production -- and related community exposure to pesticides -- on childhood cancer incidence using 15 years of publicly available data on disease mortality. We focus on acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), a relatively rare blood-borne cancer that develops in young children. We find a statistically significant and positive effect of soy production, both in terms of the percentage of area in soy and tons of soy produced, on pediatric ALL. These effects are larger when we consider soy production in the entire Ottobasin, demonstrating the effects of agrotoxin exposure via water supply. Our results are robust to a series of different empirical specifications. We consider these health effects in the context of public health policy and infrastructure in Brazil. This work speaks to the need for stronger regulation of agrotoxins as well as increased public health attention to cope with exposure in the broader community.