This dissertation consists of three essays on early childhood health and development. In Chapter 1, I examine the long-term educational impacts of the Early Head Start program. Early Head Start (EHS) is a federally funded, early childhood program in the U.S. that provides services to low-income parents of children ages 0-3. Using the staggered county-level rollout of EHS and administrative Census data, this study estimates the intent-to-treat (ITT) effect of the program on long-run educational attainment. I find evidence that EHS exposure resulted in a 0.8 pp. (1.1%) increase in a cohort’s college attendance and a 1.2 pp. (3.2%) increase in their college graduation. In Chapter 2, I measure the effect of EPA mercury regulations on infant health and mortality. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has attempted to mitigate the effects of exposure to mercury, a known neurotoxin, through a rule known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS). I use the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) dataset to analyze the effectiveness of the MATS rule in both reducing mercury emissions and improving infant health and mortality. MATS leads to a statistically significant reduction in mercury emissions by over 30%, but does not result in any significant effect on birth weight or infant mortality by county. In Chapter 3, I quantify the long-term impact of early childhood lead exposure on future criminal behavior. Social scientists have hypothesized that early childhood exposure to lead may be a driver of negative later-life outcomes, such as future educational impairment and criminal activity. Using census tract-level information in lead testing records, the analysis uses the percentage of housing in each census tract built before a 1978 federal ban on lead paint in new houses as an instrument for blood lead levels. This study finds a significant 0.226 percentage point increase in elevated blood lead levels in response to a one percentage point increase in housing built before the federal ban, and then finds an increase of 3.46 total arrests in response to a one percentage point increase in elevated blood lead levels 15 years earlier.

This dissertation evaluates the effectiveness of public policies that aim to improve development. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of Progresa program on urban areas and children's health measures in Mexico. Using a differences-in-differences design by a locality's first year of enrollment and the children's age at first exposure to treatment, I estimate the effects of receiving one additional year of treatment during early adolescence. My findings corroborate the RCT's positive impacts on children's height but also underscore some unintended effects of the program on adolescent's health, such as an increase in the prevalence of overweight and obesity, particularly among girls.

The second chapter studies the effects of Progresa's cash transfer (CT) intervention on rural children's health outcomes in Mexico. I decompose these effects by conditionality, exploiting a discontinuity in the minimum eligible age for receiving the education CT component. Conditional on family structure and birth order, I estimate the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) of receiving a higher CT during early childhood. My results show an increase of 0.13 SD in standardized height-by-age (z-scores) for children who received earlier the education CT --though not statistically significant. While my estimates are imprecise, their magnitude is consistent with previous literature evaluating the effects of Progresa on children's height.

The third chapter documents that municipalities in central Mexico closer in the past to an agricultural estate (hacienda) are associated with higher literacy and lower poverty throughout the 20th century than municipalities similar in other respects but farther away from a hacienda. The results are robust to various specifications, neighbor-matching analyses, and a placebo-type test. The complementarities between late-colonial haciendas in central Mexico and mining and trade appear to have set municipalities close to a hacienda on a distinct development path. The evidence points to local scale economies in hacienda locations that coordinated new investments away from agriculture and toward the latest industrial and commercial sectors. Our findings highlight the role of landed estates as centers linking rural economic activity to the main colonial economic activities.