This dissertation contains three chapters in the field of development economics and applied microeconomics. The first chapter studies the effect of higher education on an individual’s life outcomes and how the effect evolves over her life cycle. The second chapter examines how a woman-centered, preference-based counseling procedure shapes women’s contraceptive preferences and behavior. The third chapter investigates the impact of construction activities of transportation infrastructure on local economic outcomes. Chapter 1 examines the effect of higher education on an individual’s life outcomes, and how the effect evolves over her life cycle. I use as a natural experiment the most ambitious educational reform in Chinese history, the reinstatement of the National College Entrance Examination (the Gaokao) following the end of the Cultural Revolution. Using Census data in 1990 and 2000, I find discontinuous changes in the likelihood of completing high school and attending college around a cutoff birth date, which are shown to be induced by the policy shock. Through a combination of regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference methods, this chapter finds that cohorts that were more likely to complete high school and obtain a college education as a result of the reform were more likely to have a high-socioeconomic (SES) occupation in their early 30s, and the effect becomes smaller in their 40s. More educated cohorts, and in particular women, tend to marry later. Individuals with higher education were less likely to be ever married in their 40s. Finally, individuals with higher education tend to delay childbearing and migrate more in both their 30s and 40s, plausibly due to greater returns to migration for the more educated. Chapter 2 (with Mahesh Karra) examines how a woman-centered, preference-based approach to family planning counseling shapes women's contraceptive preferences and behavior. By implementing a randomized controlled trial in urban Malawi, we explore how a woman's decision-making may be shaped by: 1) the number and types of contraceptive methods presented to her based on her stated preferences for contraception (targeted counseling); and 2) the presence of her husband / male partner at the time of counseling. Women were subsequently offered free transport and access to family planning methods and services at a clinic for one month. We find that women who received targeted counseling were 15.6 percent less likely to be using their stated ideal contraceptive method at follow-up and were 17.5 percent more likely to exhibit discordance between their stated and ideal method at follow-up. On the other hand, women who were encouraged to invite their husbands to the counseling session were 13.5 percent less likely to change their stated ideal method from counseling to follow-up but 16.6 percent more likely to be using their stated ideal method at follow-up. While both approaches aim to achieve the goal of ``helping women make informed choices on family planning'', neither seems to yield strictly preferred outcomes for women. Chapter 3 investigates how the construction of the three earliest high-speed railway (HSR) lines in mid-Southern China affects economic activity. By formulating a set of counterfactual railway lines following the HSR planbook (MLTRP) issued by the central government, and by utilizing nighttime light data (NTL) from 1992 to 2013, I implement an event-study analysis to quantify how HSR construction transforms the local economic activity as proxied by the NTL. Furthermore, I employ county-level data on economic indicators to pin down the channels at work underlying the effects. I find that: 1) the grid-level NTL significantly increased compared to the counterfactual regions one year after the HSR construction, but there is no significant impact following the operation of the HSR lines; 2) the positive construction impacts can be explained by the provisions of associated local amenities, temporary clearing of households, as well as structural transformation from agricultural towards non-agricultural sectors.