Three Essays on Social Insurance

This dissertation consists of three chapters on the economics of social insurance. Each chapter explores an aspect of the evaluation and design of social insurance in terms of nutrition, healthcare and unemployment. The first chapter, Kim, Fleisher and Sun (2016) report evidence of long-term adverse health impacts of fetal malnutrition explore of middle-aged survivors of the 1959-1961 China Famine using data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. The second chapter evaluates the welfare benefits of the New Cooperative Medical Scheme (NCMS), the main public health insurance plan for the rural population in China. The third chapter examines the effect of a two-tiered unemployment insurance system, combining both the unemployment insurance savings account and the current unemployment insurance.