Essays in applied microeconomics

In this dissertation, I explore three important topics in health, labor, and political economics. In Chapter 1, I examine the impact of abortion restriction laws on young voter turnout in presidential elections. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), which had protected women's rights to abortion. In response, young voters have prioritized the abortion issue when voting in the 2022 midterm elections. This chapter explores whether young voters have been responsive to abortion issues in the past, using policies with varying levels of public awareness and differing impacts on women in this population. I analyze the effect of abortion restriction policy introductions on voter turnout among individuals aged 18 to 24. The analysis is extended to include subgroups, such as young women and broader age group ranges, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the policy impacts across different demographics. Using a staggered event study model that leverages state-level variations in abortion policy introductions, this study finds a positive impact on young voter turnout after introductions of parental involvement and mandatory waiting period laws that are more widely known to the public. Specifically, parental involvement laws increase young voter participation by 5.7 percentage points in the first presidential election after the introduction. Mandatory waiting period law introductions increase young voter participation by 6.3 percentage points. The increased voter participation persists in the subsequent presidential election year. Notably, this positive effect is more pronounced among young female voters. Similar effects are found for a broader age group. In Chapter 2, I explore the impacts of abortion clinic closures on county gubernatorial voting patterns in Texas. Starting in 2011, Texas began to impose supply-side restriction policies on family planning providers, particularly the ones affiliated with Planned Parenthood. In 2013, Texas passed another set of abortion restrictions, the Texas House Bill 2, imposing stringent restrictions on abortion providers. As a result, more than half of the abortion clinics closed in Texas between 2011 and 2014. This chapter explores whether the loss of abortion clinic access within close distance contributes to changes in voting behavior. Treatment definitions are explored using different distance cutoffs: 25, 50, and 100 miles. The synthetic control method is used to estimate the gaps in voter participation between treated and counterfactual units, before and after the clinic closures. Counties losing access to abortion clinics within 25 miles experience a negative impact of 3.24 percentage points (pp) or 11.0 percent on voter turnout rate in the first post-treatment gubernatorial election. Party-specific analysis shows that Republican vote share out of the voting-age population (VAP) is higher in these counties compared to the control counties retaining close access, while the Democratic vote share is lower across all pre- and post-treatment years. I also find a decreasing trend for this Democratic vote share in the election year just before the policy implementation, indicating pretrends. For larger distance cutoffs, similar pretrends are observed, particularly in the Democratic vote share out of the VAP. This suggests that the observed changes cannot be solely attributed to the clinic closures as the initial pre-treatment distance to the nearest abortion clinic increases. In Chapter 3, I analyze the effects of minimum wage changes on the child care labor market outcomes. While expensive child care prices have been a growing concern for Americans, child care workers continue to receive very low pay. This chapter explores the impact of minimum wage variations on child care labor market outcomes, including wages and labor force participation. The analysis begins with a descriptive examination of child care worker wages and their trends from 1983 to 2019, in relation to federal and state minimum wages. The canonical minimum wage difference-in-differences (DID) model is used to analyze the effects on labor market outcomes in the child care industry and related occupations. The findings indicate that minimum wage changes have small positive effects on the hourly wages of child care workers, with wages increasing by less than 1 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage. Additionally, small negative effects are observed on the working hours of salary-paid child care workers.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Kim, Sarah

Contributors dc:contributor

• Powers, Elizabeth T
• Krasa, Stefan
• Bartik, Alexander W
• Borgschulte, Mark

• Abortion
• Parental Involvement
• Mandatory Waiting Period
• Trap Law
• Young Voters
• Voter Turnout
• Labor Economics
• Minimum Wage
• Child Care

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Sarah Kim

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125812

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125812