Abstract
This dissertation consists of three chapters that study how public policies affect health-related outcomes in China. The first two papers examine the impacts of the country's Critical Illness Insurance program on health-related outcomes. The third paper studies the effects of maternal education on children's early childhood health outcomes and cognitive skills. The first chapter evaluates the impact of a recent social health insurance benefits expansion program on middle-aged and elderly individuals. In 2012, China launched a Critical Illness Insurance (CII) program, which aimed to reduce out-of-pocket costs for individuals covered by the government's health insurance programs. This chapter utilizes the staggered timing of CII adoption across cities to estimate the impact of CII on medical costs and health services for middle-aged and elderly individuals. For rural insured people, I find that CII had a negligible impact on the likelihood of using inpatient care but decreased out-of-po