Three empirical essays on program evaluation focus on childcare policy and immigration law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis is comprised of three empirical essays, focusing on evaluating two programs of interest. The first program is a before- and after-school care policy, implemented exclusively in the province of Quebec in 1998. This program provided childcare services to kindergarten and primary-school children on school premises before school time, during lunch and after school. This unique program not only reduced the cost of after-school care to $5 per day, but also increased the provision of care substantially. Using this policy as a natural experiment, we study the causal effects of after-school care’s expansion and subsidization on childcare arrangements and child’s development in Chapter 1 and on maternal labor market outcomes in Chapter 2.In particular, Chapter 1 focuses on studying the causal impact of this program on child’s scholastic achievements, non-cognitive skills, health outcomes as well as habit formation. Using the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Child and Youth (NLSCY), we adopt a difference-in-differences methodology to compare primary school children in Quebec beforeand after the reform, to the same school-grade cohorts in the rest of Canada. The policy effectively increases the use of after-school care by 8 percentage points, which mainly substitutes the use of child’s own care and sibling’s care. The intent-to-treat estimates further show a deterioration in child’s overall non-cognitive development but an improvement on their health outcomes. However, these effects do not persist in the medium run. Chapter 2 examines the effect of the same program on maternal labor market outcomes, since childcare options are closely connected to mothers’ labor supply decisions.We define mothers in Quebec with the youngest child aged 6 to 11 as the treatment group, and mothers with the youngest child in the same age cohort in the Rest of Canada as the control group.Using the Survey of Labor Income Dynamics (SLID), we analyze mother’s labor supply on the intensive and the extensive margins, as well as their earning outcomes. Our results show that the after-school care reform increases maternal employment on the extensive margins by 2-3 percentage points, but has no significant effect on employment intensity. Further examination of heterogeneous samples reveal that the policy effect on maternal labor supply is driven exclusively by highly educated mothers from lower non-maternal income households. In the meantime, mothers’ earning profiles have seen significant improvement as well.Chapter 3 turns to another policy targeting immigrants to Canada. This chapter attempts to uncover citizenship premiums on labor market outcomes. To identify the causal effect of citizenship, we make use of changes in the Canadian Citizenship Act of 2014, which extended the physical presence requirement for citizenship from 3 out of 5 years to 4 out of 6 years. After addressing selection issues, a difference-in-differences methodology is employed to compare changes in labor market outcomes of equivalent immigrants, who only differ from each other with respect to their eligibility for citizenship due to the revamped residency requirement. Using the Canadian Labor Force Survey (LFS) along with the Permanent Resident Landing File (PRLF), our results suggest that delaying citizenship eligibility by one year imposes significant impacts on both the extensive and the intensive margins of labor supply. Even though affected immigrants tend to participate more actively in the labor market during the selected periods after the new law has been implemented, their wage earnings are negatively affected. This results may be explained by the increased likelihood or willingness of affected immigrants to engage in jobs with irregular schedules and the rise in finding alternative sources of working opportunities such as self-employment
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.086 | 0.218 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".