| Summary: | This dissertation presents two essays in health economics.
The first essay explores whether legislation seeking to restrict abortion access may unintentionally limit access to non-abortion services as well. Specifically, I ask whether more restrictive abortion legislation affects women's preventive care use. To address this question, I use a measure of state-level abortion legislation restrictiveness from 2005--2012, combined with data on preventive care use, in a differences-in-differences framework. I find that a 1-unit increase in restrictiveness (on a 0--4 scale) results in a 2.6--3.0 percentage point decrease in the annual routine checkup utilization rate among women ages 18--44. This impact is magnified among women with a high school diploma or less, who experience a 5.3--6.3 percentage point decrease, suggesting that restrictions on abortion access may differentially impact providers who serve less-educated women. I do not find consistent evidence of statistically significant impacts on Pap tests, clinical breast exams, or HIV tests, and the estimates reject large negative effects.
The second essay examines the widespread occurrence of rural-to-urban migration in China, which benefits families financially but also creates family separations. I use panel data from Gansu, China, to study how paternal migration affects the well-being of left-behind daughters versus sons. I examine a range of child outcomes by gender, particularly nutrition, time allocation, educational views, and self-discipline. Considering other channels through which paternal migration could differentially impact daughters and sons, I also focus on changes in mothers' decision-making authority and attitudes toward gender equality. My estimation strategies involve first-differenced OLS and IV, where I instrument for changes in migration status with labor market shocks to village-specific migration destinations. I find that paternal migration results in a large, statistically significant increase in protein intake only in households where the sample child is male. The gender-differentiated impact of paternal migration is less clear-cut, though, for educational views and the other measures of behavioral and attitudinal change.
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