Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

Date

2026

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Economics

Committee Chair

Albert Okunade

Committee Member

Gregory Lubiani

Committee Member

Jake Organ

Committee Member

Joonhyung Lee

Abstract

This dissertation presents three empirical essays examining the effects of public health policy and informal caregiving on labor market outcomes in the United States. The first essay evaluates the effectiveness of a major alcohol policy in reducing traffic fatalities and improving public safety. The second and third essays investigate how informal eldercare and childcare (two understudied aspects of household time allocation) constrain formal labor market participation. Together, the essays apply rigorous causal identification strategies of difference-in differences (DiD) and instrumental variable (IV) methods, to administrative and time use survey data, generating evidence with direct implications for public health, labor supply, and social policy. Essay 1 explores new causal evidence on how Open Container Laws (OCLs) impact US alcohol-related motor vehicle fatalities from 1990 to 2020. OCLs prohibit drivers (and in stricter versions, all vehicle occupants) from possessing or consuming alcohol in moving vehicles. Exploiting staggered OCL adoption across 44 states between 1998 and 2017, with exception states, this study applies the Callaway and Sant'Anna (2021) staggered DiD and stacked DiD framework to address treatment heterogeneity. Data is from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), Alcohol Policy Information System (APIS), Census Bureau, and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Results show that OCL adoption reduces alcohol-related fatalities by 22-34% for up to four years post-implementation, with stronger effects in urban and high-penalty states. This suggests that OCLs have meaningful but temporary deterrence effects with important direct public policy implications for road safety and life expectancy. Essay 2 investigates how informal eldercare duration and composite caregiving intensity affect employment (IV Probit) and weekly work hours (IV 2SLS) using the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) from 2003-2024. Informal care refers to unpaid career care support by family members, friends, neighbors or other closely related persons to individuals with dwindling physical capacity, cognitive impairment or life-constraining chronic illness. Results differ by age, sex, race, worker class and Medicaid coverage, with state and time fixed effects alongside pandemic and non-pandemic weights. Findings carry urgent policy implications for working caregivers and elderly healthcare quality given the increasingly critical labor-market constraints amidst a rapidly aging population, record low fertility, and eroding caregiver support ratio. Essay 3 relates to how household time devoted to informal childcare causally impacts formal employment and weekly work hours using the same ATUS data from 2003-2024 and IV identification strategy from essay 2. While parental labor market activity shapes child outcomes, the reverse channel on how childcare obligations constrain formal work remains empirically under-identified due to pervasive reverse causality. This study distinguishes between household (HH) and non-household children under 18 years old, using paid childcare services, primary and secondary care while controlling for industries, educational attainment, number of children, quadratic family income, regional, state and county variations. Heterogeneous findings by age, sex, race, worker class, marital status and Medicaid/Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) enrolment highlight the important role of HH and paid care services, with labor supply implications for these informal carers and the healthcare quality of children. Together, these three essays advance the empirical literature on how public policy and household care obligations shape individual behavior and aggregate labor supply in the US. This dissertation contributes causal evidence that targeted regulatory interventions reduce preventable mortality while informal care across age distributions imposes quantifiable and heterogeneous labor market costs. These results underscore the need for policy frameworks that treat public health and care support as workforce and socio-economic priorities during demographic change.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest/Clarivate.

Notes

Embargoed until 07-22-2028

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Available for download on Saturday, July 22, 2028

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