Essays on development and growth

This dissertation consists of three essays on development economics and economic growth. The first essay analyzes the schooling decisions of poor households with adolescent children in urban Brazil using a framed field experiment. It concludes that parent-child conflict plays a crucial role in these schooling decisions, with most parents being unable to control their child's school attendance behavior, in particular due to lack of observability of the child's actions. It also provides evidence that parental demand to control that behavior is not just to provide the child with skills but also to keep the child safe and off the streets. The second essay diverges from political economy models in which the rich do not want the poor to obtain education, using evidence from Brazil. Combining city-level evidence with a new survey, it argues that public education spending is low in countries like Brazil not because the rich oppose it, but because the poor prefer the governments to spend resources elsewhere. The third essay introduces endogenous and directed technical change in a growth model with environmental constraints and limited resources. It characterizes the structure of equilibria and the dynamic tax/subsidy policies that achieve sustainable growth or maximize intertemporal welfare. It generates new insights on the role and timing of optimal environmental policy.