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On June 13, 2008 a forest fire affected Eastern Halifax Regional Municipality leading to the evacuation of five hundred homes and eighteen horse facilities. At the time of the June 2008 forest fire not all horses in Nova Scotia were insured. I am using the horse facilities affected by the fire as a natural experiment to answer the following question: Did the June 2008 forest fire cause horse facility operators to change their insurance decisions? To answer this question surveys were completed by horse facilities in the affected (treatment) and unaffected (control) areas. Data collected from horse facilities operators suggest they did change insurance decisions. Given the proximity in time and place to the June 2008 forest fire, horse facilities in both the treatment and control groups felt more at risk and were likely motivated to insure coverage for a low probability but high risk hazard.

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Education policy is frequently in the crosshairs of ideological disagreement. This dissertation analyzes three controversial policies over which elected school boards often have control: charter schools, suspension bans, and ability groups. How do charter schools impact district academic growth? Researchers typically focus on large districts with many charter schools, but the most common experience is an average-sized district shifting from no charters to one. A difference-in-differences design analyzing a decade of charter expansion in California reveals that impact is contingent on charter type: locally funded charters (i.e. affiliated with the district) lead to either static or decreased growth while directly funded charters (i.e. independent of the district) lead to higher academic growth. Many policymakers have banned or limited suspensions for all but the most serious offenses. The 2013 suspension ban in Los Angeles Unified School District provides a natural experiment; it led to a substantial, 0.2 standard deviation decrease in academic growth among middle schools that had previously issued the banned suspensions. Four subsequent suspension bans – in San Francisco, Pasadena, Oakland, and (grades K-3) all of California – also appear to have harmed academic growth. Simultaneously, suspension bans have an uncertain relationship with dropout rates, the primary mechanism by which bans are meant to impact the school-to-prison pipeline. Instead of banning suspensions, policymakers should carefully test other efforts that decrease suspension and dropout rates without harming academic growth. Finally, educators have utilized between-class ability grouping – sorting students in one grade into different classes by prior ability – for over a century. Proponents rely on a previously untested mechanism: decreased classroom dispersion in prior academic ability allows teachers to target their instruction more narrowly. This final paper measures classroom dispersion directly for the same students over four trimesters. Multivariate regressions and multilevel models evaluate the relationship between classroom dispersion and academic growth while controlling for other classroom characteristics as well as student, teacher, and school effects. Analyses reveal that English classrooms with less dispersion in prior ability experience slightly less growth. However, there is a trade-off: between-class ability grouping improves equity at the expense of overall academic growth.

This thesis consists of three independent essays, unified by the common theme of the distributional impacts of government. The first paper estimates the price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst high-income older people in Australia. It exploits a natural experiment by which some people gained entitlement to a price reduction through the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card (CSHC). The preferred model is a nonlinear Instrumental Variable (IV) difference-in-difference regression, estimated on repeated cross sectional survey data using the Generalised Method of Moments. No significant evidence is found for endogenous card take-up, and so cross-sectional estimates are also considered. Taking all of the results and possible sources of bias into account, the ??headline?? estimate is -0.1, implying that quantity demanded is not highly responsive to price. The elasticity estimate is a key input into the second paper which analyses the distributional impact of the CSHC. I consider the trade-off between moral hazard and risk pooling. There have been few previous attempts internationally to address this trade-off empirically for any health insurance scheme. The utility gain through risk-pooling is found to be negligible. However, the deadweight loss through moral hazard may be considerable. I also use an illustrative model to demonstrate the possible effects of the CSHC on inter-temporal savings behaviour. While the CSHC may induce some people to save, it may have the opposite effect on others. The net impact was not determined. The third paper estimates the Australian public sector wage premium. It includes a detailed critical review of the methods available to address this issue. The chosen approach is a quasi-differenced panel data model, estimated by nonlinear IV, which has many advantages over other methods and has not been used before for this topic. I find a positive average public sector wage premium for both sexes. The best estimates are 10.0% for men and 7.1% for women. The estimate for men is statistically significant (p < 0.04) and borders on significance for women (p < 0.07). No evidence is found to suggest that the public sector has an equalising effect on the wages of its workers.

In this manuscript there a new method that possesses an element of early development of children is introduced. In this case the “game”, that learn pupils of primary school to perform the laboratory work, is suggested. The primary school students are acquainted with the aim of experiments, the order of their performing and the results description. There have performed several examinations of the after performing the laboratory work. Thus, the good development results were achieved. Primary science education in Lithuania is compared with primary education in Sweden.

This thesis consists of three independent essays, unified by the common theme of the distributional impacts of government. The first paper estimates the price elasticity of demand for pharmaceuticals amongst high-income older people in Australia. It exploits a natural experiment by which some people gained entitlement to a price reduction through the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card (CSHC). The preferred model is a nonlinear Instrumental Variable (IV) difference-in-difference regression, estimated on repeated cross sectional survey data using the Generalised Method of Moments. No significant evidence is found for endogenous card take-up, and so cross-sectional estimates are also considered. Taking all of the results and possible sources of bias into account, the ??headline?? estimate is -0.1, implying that quantity demanded is not highly responsive to price. The elasticity estimate is a key input into the second paper which analyses the distributional impact of the CSHC. I consider the trade-off between moral hazard and risk pooling. There have been few previous attempts internationally to address this trade-off empirically for any health insurance scheme. The utility gain through risk-pooling is found to be negligible. However, the deadweight loss through moral hazard may be considerable. I also use an illustrative model to demonstrate the possible effects of the CSHC on inter-temporal savings behaviour. While the CSHC may induce some people to save, it may have the opposite effect on others. The net impact was not determined. The third paper estimates the Australian public sector wage premium. It includes a detailed critical review of the methods available to address this issue. The chosen approach is a quasi-differenced panel data model, estimated by nonlinear IV, which has many advantages over other methods and has not been used before for this topic. I find a positive average public sector wage premium for both sexes. The best estimates are 10.0% for men and 7.1% for women. The estimate for men is statistically significant (p < 0.04) and borders on significance for women (p < 0.07). No evidence is found to suggest that the public sector has an equalising effect on the wages of its workers.

The geographic variation of taxonomic richness may be directly determined by climate through contemporaneous/ecological processes, versus other (e.g., historical/evolutionary processes) that happen to be collinear with contemporaneous climate. In Chapter 1 I evaluated hypotheses from both groups of explanations in North America. If contemporaneous climate controls patterns of richness, then richness should vary with climate through time in the same way that richness varies with current climate through space. Over the last ca. 11,000 yr, richness-temperature relationships remained reasonably constant. Between 12,000 and 14,000 yr BP, when climate fluctuated rapidly, richness gradients as a function of temperature were significantly shallower. If historical climate over the last 21,000 years determines patterns of richness, then historical climate should be a better predictor of richness than contemporaneous climate. I rejected historical-climate as a better predictor of richness. Contemporaneous climate stands as the most plausible explanation for contemporaneous patterns of richness, at least over the last 11,000 yr. In Chapter two, I tested the prediction that richness of most taxa should increase with temperature in all but the warmest and driest areas. Climate warming during Pleistocene-Holocene transition led richness increases in wet areas, but richness declines in dry regions, as expected from current richness-climate relationships. A decline in small mammal species richness in Northern California since the late Pleistocene was expected from the current richness-climate relationship for this group in North America. These results contest the view that future global warming may lead to species extinction rates that would qualify as the sixth mass extinction in the history of the earth. In chapter three, I first tested the hypothesis that richness gradients mainly reflect the sum of individual species climatic tolerances. I tested this hypothesis for birds, mammals and trees native to eastern North America (ENA, where there are no major barriers to dispersal). The number of species present in any given area in ENA is usually much smaller than the number of species in the continental pool that tolerate the climatic conditions in that area. Second, I tested several explanations for patterns of unfilled potential richness. Unfilled potential richness is inconsistent with postglacial dispersal lags, climatic variability since the Last Glacial Maximum, or with biotic interactions. In contrast, unfilled richness is highly consistent with a probabilistic model of species climate occupancy. Individual species climatic tolerances is not the process generating the main current patterns of richness, nor are post-glacial dispersal lags, climatic variability since the LGM or biotic interactions. This thesis is consistent with the hypothesis that contemporaneous climate directly controls spatial patterns of richness. Generally, there seems to be little need to invoke historical processes as determinants of current gradients of richness.

This thesis focuses on capturing causal link between alcohol consumption and one of its externalities, crime. The quasi-natural experiment of the Czech temporary ban on hard liquor following an outbreak of methanol poisonings in September 2012 provides a valuable setting for evaluation of the alcohol-crime relationship. Over the course of the prohibition, violent crime rates fell by approximately 10 %, just like the aggregate of aggravated assault, criminal threatening, vandalism and property damage. In addition, the biggest share of reduction in crime falls on weekend criminality. The number of offenders under the influence of alcohol dropped by approximately 18 % for traffic-related offences and by 28 % in non-traffic offenses. The possibility of the reduction in crime being caused by lower detection capabilities of the law enforcement was examined. The reduction in reported cases of e.g. driving under the influence might be to a large extend explained by lower detection, but it could have reduced only rates of victimless crimes. Finally, the property crime rate was not significantly affected by the intervention, except for burglaries into bars and restaurants.