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Essays in Public Policy Evaluation

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

This dissertation examines the extent to which commercial land values capitalize the subsidies of place-based policies, whether the opening of a recreational marijuana dispensary generates spillovers onto other nearby retail establishments, and if grandparents' pension eligibility engenders an intergenerational redistribution of labor supply among co-residing mothers and grandparents, and by extension, the amount of time that grandparents can transfer to mothers in the form of child care. The data used for this dissertation include restricted-access commercial land sale and retail rent data from CoStar and publicly available data from government entities, such as the United States Census Bureau, the United States Department of the Treasury's Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Washington State Liquor and Cannabis Board. The empirical methods used in this dissertation include regression discontinuity and difference-in-differences models. In the first chapter, I show that a United States federal policy that is designed to provide tax incentives to promote business investment in low-income communities throughout the country increases commercial land values by 15 percent, which implies that roughly 75 percent of the incidence of the policy's subsidies fall on landowners in the form of higher land values. In the second chapter, I estimate that the spillover effects of recreational marijuana dispensaries onto nearby businesses are small or offsetting. In the third chapter, I find a negative but minimal impact of the United States Social Security early-retirement age on grandparents' labor supply and that this plausibly exogenous source of variation in grandparents' time does not impact mothers' labor market outcomes.

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