UC Riverside

This dissertation is comprised of three essays on institutional reforms surrounding marital dissolution, domestic violence and education in Mexico. It is well accepted that a country's economic growth is greatly determined by its ability to innovate and to increase productivity. Understanding the role of family and education policy becomes relevant since there is evidence that domestic violence, divorce and education are linked to labor productivity and other socioeconomic outcomes such as health.

Using a difference-in-differences methodology, the second chapter exploits the variation in law adoption across states to estimate the impact of liberalized divorce laws on divorce rates. The findings do not support the claim that greater access to divorce has led to increasing divorce rates. In addition to the divorce laws examined in the second chapter, the third chapter estimates the impact of legal reforms that make domestic violence a punishable offense and that provide assistance programs to victims of domestic violence. In intra-household bargaining models, these laws potentially redistribute bargaining power to the victims of domestic violence, which they can use to bargain for less violence. I find that improving the bargaining position through prevention programs and counseling decreases homicides, suicides and bodily injury crimes. Policies which may leave the victim without recourse if separated from the spouse seem to be less effective.

The final chapter exploits a quasi-experimental setting to estimate the impact of more instructional days on student performance. The sources of variation arise from state-mandated changes in test-administration and the start of the school calendar year. Using an unbalanced panel of all public elementary schools and controlling for a set of school quality measures, the analysis provides evidence to support increasing the number of schools days. The results also suggest that the effects are non-linear and that in impoverished schools, having more days of instruction may be beneficial to the extent that there are other school resources that assist in the production of learning.