Human capital obtained by individuals during their life-cycle is one of the key factors contributing to a prosperous society. Human capital, in terms of education and/or work experience, leads to higher wages and therefore higher welfare of a nation. Therefore, policies encouraging employment or to acquire higher education could be potentially welfare improving. My thesis comprises of two chapters in which I study the issues related to human capital. These chapters contribute to a better understanding of the impact of policies
on the process of human capital accumulation.

In the firrst chapter "Employment, Human Capital, Marriage, Fertility, and Child Care", I tackle the question of how part-time employment affects wages and future labour supply of women and evaluate the effectiveness of child care subsidies on the process of human capital accumulation. I develop and estimate a dynamic model of employment, marital, and fertility decisions. In the model, labour supply, fertility and parental child investments are jointly determined. Household decisions are modelled in a Nash bargaining framework, where outside options are specied as spouses' value of making decisions as single agents. I use the estimated model for an ex-ante evaluation of the impact of child care subsidies on wages and employment decisions of women in the United States.

The second chapter of my thesis focuses on ex-post evaluation of 2012-2013 education reform in the UK on children's aspirations toward education. Using a difference-in-difference estimator, it can be shown that the reform decreased aspirations towards education of children in England and the decrease in aspirations is larger for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.