N. Meltem Daysal

This paper studies the effects on registered employment and number of registered establishments of two employment subsidy schemes in Turkey. We implement a difference-in-differences methodology to construct appropriate counterfactuals for the covered provinces. Our findings suggest that both subsidy programs did lead to significant net increases in registered jobs in eligible provinces (5%-13% for the first program and 11%-15% for the second). However, the cost of the actual job creation was high because of substantial deadweight losses, particularly for the first program (47% and 78%). Because of better design features, the second subsidy program had lower, though still significant, deadweight losses (27%-46%). Although constrained by data availability, the evidence suggests that the dominant effect of subsidies was to increase social security registration of firms and workers rather than boosting total employment and economic activity. This supports the theory that in countries with weak enforcement institutions, high labor taxes on low-wage workers may lead to substantial incentives for firms and workers to operate informally.

In this paper, I examine the impact of uninsured patients on the health of the insured, focusing on one health outcome -- the in-hospital mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I employ panel data models using patient discharge and hospital nancial data from California (1999-2006). My results indicate that uninsured patients have an economically significant effect that increases the mortality rate of insured heart attack patients. I show that these results are not driven by alternative explanations, including reverse causality, patient composition effects, sample selection or unobserved trends and that they are robust to a host of specification checks. My results also indicate that the primary channel for the observed spillover effects is increased hospital uncompensated care costs. Although data limitations constrain my capacity to check how hospitals change their provision of care to insured heart attack patients in response to reduced revenues, the evidence I have suggests a modest increase in the quantity of cardiac services without a corresponding increase in hospital staff.

In an aging society, determining which factors contribute to the employment of older individuals is increasingly important. This paper sheds light on the impact of medical innovation in the form of Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) on employment of middle-aged women. HRT are drugs taken by middle-aged women to soften symptoms related to menopause. Before 2002, HRT products were among the most popular prescription drugs in America. We use the timing of the release of information of the potential hazardous effects of HRT — uncovered in 2002 by the largest randomized trials on women ever undertaken — as an instrument for the purchase of the affected drugs within a Fixed Effect Instrumental Variable framework. We find that HRT use impacts employment: namely, that HRT use increases employment by 25 percentage points among middle-aged women who would have taken HRT but who do not take HRT after the release of information of its potential hazardous effects.

Currently under revision.

To estimate the causal effect of bilingual education on the academic achievement of limited English proficient (LEP) students and their peers, we exploit a policy rule in Texas requiring a school district to offer bilingual education when its enrollment of LEP students in a particular elementary grade level and language is twenty or higher. Using school panel data for 1998-99 to 2009-10, we find evidence of a significant jump up in the probability that a district offers bilingual education above this 20-student cutoff. Using this variation in exposure to bilingual education, we find that bilingual education has weak positive effects on the standardized test scores of non-LEP, non-Spanish home language students and no effects on Spanish home language students. We are able to rule out even relatively small harmful effects on non-LEP, non-Spanish home language students with 95 percent confidence.