Essays in Applied Microeconomics & Public Policy Evaluation

This dissertation comprises four papers that evaluate the effectiveness of public policies in Singapore. The first paper studies the non-tangible effect of a new non-contributory pension in Singapore on subjective well-being. It separately estimates the announcement and disbursement effects, and explores heterogenous effects resulting from differences in personal characteristics. The second paper investigates the effect of the same pension on labour supply, work expectations, private cash transfers and expenditure. The third paper evaluates a pragmatic randomised controlled trial of a new transitional care programme in a large quaternary hospital. We find that the merging of an assortment of existing transitional care services, to protocolise post-discharge patient encounters, reduced healthcare utilisation and patients’ anxiety/depression. Lastly, the fourth paper estimates heterogeneous hedonic prices for different levels of housing space. It does so by exploiting a unique space-adding housing upgrading programme in Singapore, that added a uniform amount of 6m2 of space to each existing housing unit regardless of the original size of the unit. The absolute extent of price appreciation, as well as the average price per unit housing space, varied significantly across the original size of the units.