My dissertation consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, we quantify the effect of trade-liberalization on child health outcomes for Indonesia and examine if a part of this effect played out through changes in maternal employment outcomes caused by trade liberalization. We compare children between the ages of 0-5 years in 1993, 2000 and 2007 and their mothers, across 206 districts differentially exposed to the trade reforms. We employ the linear IV 2SLS estimation method to identify the effects of trade liberalization on child health outcomes. While the partial correlations indicate trade liberalization having a positive effect on mother’s employment, and mother’s employment status having a positive effect on child health outcomes, the use of instruments to capture the causal effects indicate that trade induced maternal employment increases did not have a significant impact on child health outcomes for the overall sample. However, positive effects on child health outcomes via trade-induced increased maternal employment is detected for children in the urban sample, and for children of young and more educated mothers.

In the second chapter, we borrow the same framework as the first chapter to quantify the impact of trade liberalization on economic mobility in Indonesia. Using 7885 matched father-child pairs across the years of 1993 to 2014 we find that districts that were more exposed to tariff reforms witnessed higher likelihood among sons to supersede their father in terms of their ranks in their respective expenditure distribution. We reach a similar conclusion for the intragenerational study where 24125 individuals are tracked over the course of seven years (1993-2000). We prove that these results are driven by higher mobility in terms of employment in the formal sector.

In the last chapter, I consider the impact of highway removal on housing prices in Monroe County, New York. Using Difference-in-Difference strategy, I find that highway removal has led to increase in housing prices in the area. Successful urban renewal efforts are witnessed in terms of better integration among communities, higher number of establishments and worker sorting in hospitality industry and higher accessibility to downtown area post highway removal.