Essays on health economics

This thesis consists of three empirical chapters investigating the impact of education policies, stressful life events (SLEs), and pronatalist rhetoric on individuals' health behaviors and fertility preferences. The chapters rely on three distinct data sources: the Turkish Health Survey (THS), the German TwinLife, and the Turkish Demographic and Health Surveys (TDHS). Employing a range of empirical strategies, including fuzzy regression discontinuity design (RDD), conditional (fixed-effects) logistic regression, and Difference-in-Differences (DiD), the thesis provides novel evidence in research areas that have not been previously addressed in the literature. The first chapter investigates the causal impact of Türkiye's 2012 compulsory schooling reform, which extended mandatory education from 8 to 12 years, on smoking behavior. Using nationally representative data from the THS for 2019 and 2022, the chapter exploits the exogenous variation in educational attainment induced by the reform and employs a fuzzy RDD. The second chapter explores the association between SLEs and risky health behaviors, including smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, and drug use, using a twin-based research design. Although some studies emphasize the role of genetic and familial factors in shaping such behaviors, many cross-sectional approaches fail to control for these unobserved confounders. This chapter addresses this limitation by using data from the German TwinLife, which includes monozygotic and dizygotic same-sex twin pairs. The third chapter investigates the causal effect of the Prime Minister's pronatalist rhetoric on fertility preferences in Türkiye. Using data from the TDHS of 2008 and 2013, and cohort-based variation in exposure to the rhetoric as an identification strategy, the chapter employs a DiD approach.