Three Essays on Policy Evaluation: Quasi-Experimental Evidence on the Unintended Health Consequences of Public Policies

This dissertation investigates how public policy shapes health across the life course, focusing on three distinct policy interventions at critical life stages. The first study analyzes the impact of retirement on individual health and its spillover effects on partners, employing a regression-discontinuity design based on statutory retirement age thresholds in Germany. The findings reveal that retirement improves own life satisfaction and mental health, while also benefiting partners' mental health. The second study explores the life-cycle health effects of conscription in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), leveraging a birth cohort cutoff rule for conscription eligibility. The results show that conscription increases hospitalization rates for musculoskeletal disorders later in life and sick leave during draft-eligible ages and after the German reunification, likely due to the high physical demands of service and occupational sorting into physically demanding sectors. The third study examines the long-term health consequences of access to week care institutions in the GDR, using regional and temporal variation in the expansion of these facilities within a two-way fixed effects framework. While descriptive evidence suggests that week care attendees come from distinct family backgrounds and report poorer health outcomes in early adulthood, the causal analysis finds no statistically significant average effects of the week care expansion on adult health, likely due to limited statistical power. Together, these studies highlight the critical role of social policy in shaping health across the life course.