Public policies are an important determinant of the welfare of individuals and the society at large. Careful evaluation of the impact of public policies on welfare is therefore imperative for our understanding of the positive and normative implications for these institutions. The three chapters of this thesis examine the welfare consequences of specific economic and political institutions. Chapters 1 and 2 study two distinct channels through which social housing, a common feature of developed countries, may impact the neighborhoods in which they are built and the labor market outcomes of their low income tenants. Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of the provision of social housing on neighboring private ats. It assesses the spillovers of low-income tenants and the change in the composition of the housing stock that are to be expected from the provision of new social housing units. In particular, it uses the direct conversion of private rental flats into social units without any accompanying rehabilitation to identify the impact of the inflow into the neighborhood of low income tenants, separately from the effects of social housing on the quality of the existing housing stock. Chapter 2 shows that social housing influences the location of low income tenants, and that the neighborhood of social housing units may improve the labor market outcomes of the poorest tenants. I observe the relocation of welfare recipients through the selection process of social housing applicants in the city of Paris from 2001 to 2007. The institutional process acts as a conditional randomization device across residential areas in Paris. The empirical estimates outline that neighborhoods have weak short- and medium-run effects on the economic self-sufficiency of poor households. Chapter 3, by contrast, focuses on how regional migrations of unemployed workers may affect their job search prospect in Europe. Using a longitudinal sample of French unemployment spells, the empirical estimates outline positive migration effects on transitions from unemployment to employment that depends on the previous duration of the unemployment spells.

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one brings together the areas of public and labor economics by developing a hypothesis that relates optimal taxation and time use. Using Mexican data on household time use and consumption, we find significant substitution between goods and time in home production and different elasticities of substitution for different house-hold commodities. Adding these findings to the optimal tax problem, we show it is optimal to impose higher taxes on market goods used in the production of commodities with a lower elasticity of substitution between goods and time. This is an analog of the classical Corlett and Hague (1953) result, differing in that we allow for the possibility of substitution between goods and time in the production of commodities. The second chapter is about international migration, in the area of labor economics. On one hand, surveillance of the border between Mexico and the United States by the U.S. government has increased dramatically over the last two decades. On the other hand, undocumented Mexican migrants often make multiple trips between the two countries. Thus, my hypothesis is that these migrants respond to heightened surveillance by increasing the length of stay of the current trip. I estimate a semi-parametric hazard model following Meyer (1990). Using data from the Mexican Migration Project I find no evidence that border enforcement affects the hazard of leaving the U.S. by undocumented Mexican Immigrants. The last essay is about mother's time and children related expenditures. Using data from the Mexican Time Use Survey and the National Household Survey of Income and Expenditure from 2002, I examine the time Mexican mothers dedicate to taking care of their children and the amount of money spent by the household in raising children. The main contribution of this paper is that it analyzes child care time use and child care expenditures simultaneously. The age of the youngest child is the most important determinant of both child care time and money expenditures. It is the case that more educated mothers spend more money on their children. With respect to child care time use, more educated mothers spend more or less time with their children depending on whether they are working or non-working mothers. At all levels of non-mother's income, working mothers spend significantly more money relative to time in child care than non-working mothers. For both groups the ratio of money over time increases at a decreasing rate; however, for non-working mothers the income expansion path is much flatter.

(Cont.) We consider the impact of abortion legalization on both the number of children ever born as well as the distribution of number of children ever born. Our results indicate that much of the reduction in fertility at the time abortion was legalized was permanent in that women did not have more subsequent births as a result. We also find that this result is largely attributable to an increase in the number of women who remained childless throughout their fertile years.

This thesis is composed of three empirical papers in the field of labor and public economics. The first paper uses historical data from the New-York Stock Exchange to investigate the importance of ethnic discrimination, ethnic networks and ethnic homophily in the field of finance. The second paper studies the role of parental insurance on the job search behavior of new entrants in the labor market. It also uses parental shocks around the time of the child's entry into the labor force as an instrument to test for the existence of persistent effects from a temporary increase in job search effort at the beginning of a worker's career. The third paper takes advantage of an important tax reform that took place in Belgium in 2006 to answer a longstanding question in the field of public economics and corporate finance: what is the role of corporate taxes in determining the observed levels of leverage among incorporated firms.

Abstract: My dissertation consists of three applied studies in the area of public finance and labor economics. In the first chapter, "The effect of financial aid and tax policies on educational choices", I build and estimate a structural dynamic life-cycle model of education choices, labor force participation, and saving decisions by young men in the United States. The model is estimated with the method of simulated moments using a longitudinal sample of white, black, and Hispanic young men from the 1997 panel of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The model incorporates unobservable abilities, tuition costs, and the main features of the U.S. federal income tax. In particular, it takes into account the structure of the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit. I use the estimated model to simulate the impact of a number of education policy changes. I find a sizeable effect on college enrollment from a general tuition reduction as well as a large increase in graduate school attendance from making the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit refundable. In the second chapter, "Aggregate wage dynamics and labor supply: an application to the U.S.", I estimate labor supply elasticities using the change in the return to skills over time as a source of exogenous variation in gross wages. The last few decades have seen a tremendous amount of change in the U.S. labor market: female labor force participation rates have risen, while the wage premium for college education and wage inequality have increased because of an higher demand for skilled labor. The number of hours worked is found to react weakly to changes in the offered wage. In the third chapter, "Labor supply effects of tax-based income-support mechanisms", I build and estimate a static discrete choice model of labor supply for single women in the United States. It incorporates the main features of the federal income tax. I estimate the model using cross-sectional data, and I use it to simulate hypothetical reforms to the tax and benefit system, which is found to have a large effect on the labor force participation decision of single individuals.

Reflecting the diverse and profound changes triggered by the latest wave of economic globalization, this book highlights various governance responses at national, regional and global levels. The topics covered are wide-ranging and include economic history and development, European integration, exchange rate arrangements, industrial and labor economics, international cooperation and multilateralism, and public choice. The book is divided into three parts: The first part, which contains contributions by Barry Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau, is devoted to economic history. The second part examines open economy macroeconomics with a focus on Europe, including contributions by Jurgen von Hagen and Paul Krugman. The third part presents contributions to international political economy, and related interdisciplinary topics. This Festschrift is written in honor of Jorge Braga de Macedo, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the Nova School of Business and Economics and a distinguished Portuguese academic whose work has an impressive global reach. The contributions, written by a selection of international authors, deal with his oeuvre covering the wide range of topics broached in this book, as his publication record amply attests.