Essays on delegation and policy evaluation

In the first chapter of this thesis, my co-author and I study the tradeoff resulting from delegation of authority. Delegating decisions to an agent may benefit the principal if the agent is more informed; however, it shifts the control from the principal to the agent. We show that the principal delegates the authority when the incongruence between her and the agent (manifesting itself through externalities for principal) are not too pronounced. We then examine the effect of change in project payoff distribution on the attractiveness of delegation. We find that for families of distributions which satisfy the Monotone Likelihood Ratio Property, more favorable distributions always move the delegation range such that when externalities are positive, delegation becomes less attractive, and vice versa. The last two chapters of this thesis evaluate public policies in Canada and Iran. In the second chapter, I study the effects of covering IVF expenses under public health insurance on multiple birth rates in Canada, using a difference-in-difference model. I find little evidence that the coverage of IVF costs under public healthcare led to any significant increase in multiple birth rates. On the contrary, the coverage may have resulted in fewer multiple births, through mechanisms like single embryo transfer mandates, and the lower pressure on the patients to transfer multiple embryos in one cycle to reduce out of pocket costs. Chapter 3 studies the effectiveness of the Iranian "1993 Population Control Law". My co-author and I use data from publicly available sample 2006 census data in Iran and the annual Household Expenditure and Income Surveys (HEIS: 1988-2005) to estimate the effect of this policy on fertility outcomes. Our difference in difference method compares the change in probability of another birth in families with fewer than three children prior to the legislation to that of families with three or more children. We find that the legislation had a modest effect of 8 to 13 percent on decreasing the probability of a fourth or higher birth. The law has the highest impact after four years of implementation and after that its effect gradually vanishes.