Essays on labor economics and political economy

One explanation for why conscription may raise wages is that conscripts accumulate valuable human capital during their service in the military. An alternative theory posits that conscription affects labor market outcomes through the extensive margin. The first chapter examines those possible mechanisms by estimating the impact of the duration of military service on income, employment, and educational attainment with data from South Korea and an IV approach. While the amount of human capital increases with the duration of service, there is no effect on the extensive margin. Although I find a conscription premium: a positive relationship between conscription and income, the length of compulsory military service does not affect a worker's income or employment. On the contrary, I find that longer service length lowers conscripts' chances of obtaining post-graduate degrees suggesting a net human capital depreciation. My findings support the case that conscription primarily affects labor market outcomes through the extensive margin. In the second chapter, I use the different timing of the adoption of anti-discrimination legislation in Japan, which bans the identification of the Burakumins, to examine the effect of uncertainty on divorces with a difference-in-differences approach. I show that an increase in such uncertainty has heterogeneous effects on divorces. I find that an increase in uncertainty increases divorces in places where the information is less important and decreases divorces when that information is more important. The third chapter examines whether pharmaceutical companies directly lobbied U.S. state lawmakers for their votes on COVID vaccine legislations. I find that state legislators who received campaign contributions from pharmaceutical companies are not more likely to vote in favor of those companies on the vaccine mandates. Prior field experiments have shown that campaign contributions buy access, and the U.S. pharmaceutical industry has directly influenced key state referenda on drug pricing and regulation reforms with its political contributions. While Democrats have mainly voted for vaccine mandates, it can be quite costly for Republicans to do the same. Journalists find that the industry remained largely in the background of the controversial vaccine mandate policies and relied primarily on third-party organizations to advance its agenda. The findings of this paper seem to provide evidence for this observation.