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Title: Essays in Public Policy Issues
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Mac, Chi Tinh |
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Essays in Public Policy Issues Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2004 Cohort(s): NLSY79, Young Women Publisher: UMI - University Microfilms, Bell and Howell Information and Learning Keyword(s): Birthweight; Leave, Family or Maternity/Paternity; Maternal Employment The first two chapters analyze the effects of paid maternity leave on women's current wages and birth weight. Most workers in the US have access to unpaid parental leave benefits, and there is public interest in expanding existing coverage to provide paid leave benefits. California has already passed the first paid family leave statute, effective in 2004. An important step in considering future policy recommendations is to understand how workers have implicitly paid for new benefits in the past and how babies may have benefited from their mothers' leave-taking. I use the NLS-Young Women panel to examine the role of paid maternity leave in women's wages and the NLSY to study the effect of leave-taking on birth weight. Using a difference in difference approach, I find that younger women with paid leave benefits have wages that are 4.7 percent lower than their older counterparts. Using a fixed effects and a discontinuity design (i.e. isolating the periods before and after benefits change), I find that while wages of women with the benefits are higher overall, this is not the case during periods in which benefits change, particularly if the women acquire these benefits while staying with the same employer. I also find that women who take paid leave during pregnancy have babies that are 2.1 to 2.7 ounces heavier. In the third chapter, I consider the effects of Regulation Fair Disclosure. Reg FD was motivated by a desire to eliminate the (legal) trading advantage some investors had through selective disclosure practices. If this had been pervasive practice prior to Reg FD, then then there should have been information leakage through price run-up before official earnings announcements. I analyze the average cumulative abnormal returns for three samples: the NYSE and the largest and smallest capitalization firms of the NYSE/Amex/Nasdaq pool. The results suggest that Reg FD affected large firms more than small ones and negative information releases mor e than positive ones. There is also evidence that information leakage was already subsiding before Reg FD became effective, possibly because of voluntary compliance or the demands of the increasing number of individual investors. |
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Bibliography Citation
Mac, Chi Tinh. Essays in Public Policy Issues. Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 2004. |