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Title: Essays in local public finance
Creator: Melnik, Walter Thomas
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: My dissertation studies how political factors, local labor demand shocks, and voting behavior affect state and local public goods provision. Following a brief introduction, I begin with “Legislative Redistricting, Party Politics, and the Spatial Distribution of Transportation Expenditure.” In this essay, I estimate how a state representative's political party affects road construction expenditure in areas that she represents. An extensive literature asks how a legislator's party affiliation...
Show moreMy dissertation studies how political factors, local labor demand shocks, and voting behavior affect state and local public goods provision. Following a brief introduction, I begin with “Legislative Redistricting, Party Politics, and the Spatial Distribution of Transportation Expenditure.” In this essay, I estimate how a state representative's political party affects road construction expenditure in areas that she represents. An extensive literature asks how a legislator's party affiliation affects public expenditure in the area the legislator represents. Unfortunately, almost all studies estimate this effect using party changes through election outcomes, which could be correlated with unobservable determinants of transportation expenditure. To overcome this issue, I identify my estimates using changes in party affiliation engendered by the 2012 state legislative redistricting in Ohio. In many cases, redistricting moved a geographic area into a district whose incumbent representative belonged to the opposing political party. This created variation in partisan alignment unrelated to election outcomes. From 2010-2017 the Republican party controlled the Ohio House of Representatives, the Ohio Senate, and the governorship. Using variation due to redistricting for identification, I find that areas moving from Republican to Democratic districts due to redistricting received $3.5 million (0.19 standard deviations) less annual highway construction funding than areas that remained in Republican districts. This funding decrease derives from a decline in the number of large construction projects in these areas. The estimated effects differ substantially when identified using variation through voting in non-redistricting years, perhaps due to selection issues concerning the type of districts changing parties through election outcomes. In addition, the expenditure change associated with a party change through election outcomes depends on whether the incumbent lost an election or retired, further evincing selection issues associated with this variation.In my next essay, “Municipal Government Reaction to Mass Layoffs in Ohio,” I study how municipal government finances respond to negative local employment shocks. Using data from 595 municipalities in Ohio, I estimate the change in municipal revenue after reported mass layoffs and plant closings, as well as the municipality's response: possible adjustments to tax rates, expenditure, and borrowing. I find that income tax revenue plummets in the year after a mass layoff, driven by a large decline in income tax base. Municipalities do not raise income or property tax rates to compensate for the income tax drop - rather, tax rates decline slightly. Property tax revenue also declines, while revenue from service charges and fees and intergovernmental revenue do not change significantly. Thus, total revenue drops substantially for several years after a mass layoff. In response, municipalities cut expenditure across several categories, including general government, public safety, leisure and community environment, and capital outlay. Cities also draw down their unreserved fund balance substantially, avoiding deeper cuts to expenditure by depleting their accumulated funds.In my last essay, “ Ballot Order and Ballot Roll-off: Evidence from Ohio,” coauthored with Mike Conlin and Paul Thompson, I study how an election item’s position on the ballot affects the probability that voters abstain from voting on that item (“roll-off”), and on the probability that voters choose to vote yes conditional on casting a ballot. Local tax referenda in Ohio rotate ballot position every year based on the level of local jurisdiction that placed the referendum on the ballot, providing a source of exogenous variation to test these propositions. Previous research suggests that voters are less likely to cast a vote for election items lower on the ballot, and more likely to choose the status quo. These findings support the idea of choice fatigue, suggesting that facing more decisions impairs voters’ decision making ability. Unlike previous papers, I am able to control for demographic characteristics (age and party affiliation) of voters who see each referendum. I find that voters tend to cast more yes votes for items lower on the ballot. I also find that older voters are much less likely, and partisan voters much more likely, to abstain from ballot items, showing the importance of controlling for these characteristics when estimating the effect of ballot position on roll-off.
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Title: Three Essays in the Economics of Education
Creator: Kho, Kevin
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Chapter 1: School Cellphone Bans and Student Substance Abuse: Evidence From California Public High SchoolsFollowing high profile school shootings and the September 11th terrorist attacks, public concern over school emergency preparedness prompted the California State Legislature in 2003 to overturn a statewide ban against student possession of cellphones on campuses. After the repeal of the prohibition, which had been established in 1988 to curb drug dealing, school districts were allowed...
Show moreChapter 1: School Cellphone Bans and Student Substance Abuse: Evidence From California Public High SchoolsFollowing high profile school shootings and the September 11th terrorist attacks, public concern over school emergency preparedness prompted the California State Legislature in 2003 to overturn a statewide ban against student possession of cellphones on campuses. After the repeal of the prohibition, which had been established in 1988 to curb drug dealing, school districts were allowed individually to either continue banning phones or modify their device policies; most opted over time to accommodate usage during certain hours of the day. Using fixed effects regression analysis clustered at the district level, I exploit variation in the timing of district policies to estimate the impact on substance abuse from lifting school cellphone bans. Results provide evidence that allowing students to use cellphones at school increases opportunities to obtain and abuse controlled substances; this effect is particularly pronounced in the incidence of marijuana smoking among 9th graders, who exhibit a 1.3 percentage point higher chance of reporting past-month marijuana use in the year a ban is lifted.Factors involved may include the capability that the technology provides to negotiate high risk interactions in private and to seek out and contact a relatively small number of drug suppliers; as is thus to be expected, no impact is found on the consumption of cigarettes, which can be obtained legally by a large proportion of high schoolers.Chapter 2: Impact of Internet Access on Student Learning in Peruvian Schools (with Leah Lakdawala and Eduardo Nakasone)We investigate the impacts of school-based internet access on pupil achievement in Peru, using a large panel of 5,903 public primary schools that gained internet connections during 2007-2014. We employ an event study approach and a trend break analysis that exploit variation in the timing of internet roll-out up to 5 years after installation. We find that internet access has a moderate, positive short-run impact on school-average standardized math scores, but importantly that this effect grows over time. We provide evidence that schools require time to adapt to internet access by hiring teachers with computer training and that this process is not immediate. These dynamics highlight the need for complementary investments to fully exploit new technological inputs and underscores the importance of using an extended evaluation window to allow the effects of school-based internet on learning to materialize.Chapter 3: Discretionary School Discipline Policies and Demographic DisparitiesIn 2014, California passed the law AB 420, becoming the first state to limit the use of school suspensions and expulsions as punishment for "willful defiance" - a subjectively determined offense thought by state lawmakers to lead to racial disparities in discipline. In this paper, I overview the state's recent (from 2012-2017) progress in reducing exclusionary discipline and note effects on disproportionality, here characterized as the difference between a given group's proportion of discipline and its proportion of enrollment. Using identification by treatment intensity, based on schools' pre AB 420 proportion of discipline attributable to willful defiance, I also attempt to gauge the effectiveness of reducing punishment of defiance in mitigating disproportionality. School level administrative data from elementary schools (spanning kindergarten through 5th grade) indicate that exclusionary discipline has considerably declined throughout the period. On the other hand, it does not appear that AB 420, along with lower willful defiance related discipline, has reduced disproportionality.
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Title: Essays in the economics of education
Creator: Lee, Hwanoong
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on...
Show more"This dissertation comprises three essays on the Economics of Education. Its ultimate focus is to understand how different agents in the education market respond to releasing information about teacher and school performance and how public interventions influence human capital accumulation. The first essay "The Effect of Releasing Teacher Performance Information to Schools: Teachers' Response and Student Achievement" examines the effects of releasing teacher value-added (VA) information on student performance in two settings; in the first, VA data was released to all potential employers within the district, while in the second, only the current employer received the data. I find that student achievement increased only in the district where the VA scores were provided to all potential employers. These effects were driven solely by improved performance among ex-ante less-effective teachers; the null effects in the other setting, however, were driven by moderate declines in performance among ex-ante highly-effective teachers and small improvements among less-effective teachers. These results highlight the importance of understanding how the design features of VA disclosure translate into the productivity of teachers. The second essay "The Role of Credible Threats and School Competition within School Accountability Systems: Evidence from Focus Schools in Michigan" studies the impact of receiving accountability labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of Focus (schools with the largest achievement gaps) labels and find that schools receiving the Focus label improved the performance of low-achieving students relative to their barely non-Focus counterparts, and they did so without hurting high-achieving students. The positive achievement effects for Focus schools were entirely driven by Title 1 Focus schools that faced financial sanctions associated with being labeled the following year. There is no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine heterogeneous effects by looking at the number of alternative nearby schooling options. I find that when schools are exposed to a competitive choice environment, receiving the Focus label increased math test scores across the scoring distribution, while schools located in an uncompetitive choice environment improved the test scores of low achievers only. This evidence may suggest the importance of incorporating credible sanctions and school choice options into the school accountability system to maximize the effectiveness of the system on student achievement. Finally, the third essay "The Effects of School Accountability Systems Under NCLB Waiver: Evidence from Priority Schools in Michigan" investigates the impact of receiving Priority labels on the student achievement distribution under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. Using a sharp regression discontinuity (RD) design, I examine the achievement effects of the Priority (schools with the lowest performance) label and find no evidence of an achievement effect associated with the Priority label. Next, I examine whether assigning the Priority label induced the changes in the composition of students. I define several key measures of student composition and find no evidence that the Priority designation influenced the student composition of schools."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Essays in industrial organization
Creator: Kim, Hyunsoo (Economist)
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The first essay "Tying and Platforms’ R&D Incentives in Two-sided markets" analyzes how the tying arrangements can affect platforms’ R&D incentives in two-sided markets under the possibility of multi-homing. The model shows that when all consumers single-home, the tying distorts platforms’ R&D incentives because the tying acts as a commitment device to invest aggressively in R&D, leading to rival firm being foreclosed in the R&D decision stage even if the tying does not have exclusionary...
Show moreThe first essay "Tying and Platforms’ R&D Incentives in Two-sided markets" analyzes how the tying arrangements can affect platforms’ R&D incentives in two-sided markets under the possibility of multi-homing. The model shows that when all consumers single-home, the tying distorts platforms’ R&D incentives because the tying acts as a commitment device to invest aggressively in R&D, leading to rival firm being foreclosed in the R&D decision stage even if the tying does not have exclusionary effect in the price competition. However, when exclusive contents are offered to each platform so that some of the consumers can engage in multi-homing, the tying raises the rival firm’s R&D incentives as well as the tying firm’s R&D incentives. This is because i) tying induces more consumers to multi-home so that total demand of consumers for both platforms can be increased and ii) the strategic effect in R&D competition disappears in the multi-homing case on the consumer side, implying that the rival firm’s R&D incentives is not affected by more aggressive R&D investment of tying firm. Thus, the anti-competitiveness of tying involved with innovation can vary depending on the possibility of consumer’s multi-homing.The second essay "Information Sharing and R&D Incentives" investigates how sharing of cost information affects firms’ incentives to invest in cost reduction and the role of the observability of rivals’ R&D investment level. I study duopoly price competition with cost reducing R&D in three cases: the complete information case, unobservable investment case and observable investment case. The opponents’ cost information is unknown in both the unobservable investment case and the observable investment case, but the investment level is unobservable and observable, respectively. I find that firms have identical incentives of investment in the complete information and the unobservable investment case, whereas they will tend to underinvest in cost reduction when the investment level is observable because a negative strategic effect makes investment less profitable. Due to this underinvestment, welfare and the consumer surplus decrease in the observable investment case. These results have implications for the analysis of information sharing in markets where cost reduction activities are important.The third essay "The Grandfather of Price Discrimination", coauthored with Brady Vaughan and Aleks Yankelevich, examines firms’ motivations for implementing grandfather clauses that allow certain consumers to continue access to a service at a favorable, but no longer available price. We find that when consumers are fully cognizant of their valuations for available product alternatives, firms are typically better off offering all potential consumers the optimal uniform price. However, if grandfathered consumers are made complacent, failing to reevaluate the service over time, grandfather clauses may permit firms to profitably price discriminate between early adopters and new consumers in exchange for forfeiting the right to optimally set prices for early adopters.
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Title: Control function methods in applied econometrics
Creator: Joshi, Riju
Date: 2018
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation considers estimation and inference in three econometric models containing issues commonly encountered with observational data. Fundamental issues of self-selection, endogeneity, missing observations are pervasive in observational data. Moreover, often, the observations in a dataset are rarely statistically independent and have complex dependence structures. These issues can have a significant effect on the causal effect analysis and pose serious limitations on the popular...
Show more"This dissertation considers estimation and inference in three econometric models containing issues commonly encountered with observational data. Fundamental issues of self-selection, endogeneity, missing observations are pervasive in observational data. Moreover, often, the observations in a dataset are rarely statistically independent and have complex dependence structures. These issues can have a significant effect on the causal effect analysis and pose serious limitations on the popular methodologies that either maintain restrictive assumptions and/or require complicated and computationally tedious solutions.The dissertation aims to apply control function method as the primary tool to design estimation procedures under relaxed distributional and functional form assumptions. I describe computationally simple solutions to these issues to obtain more precise results. These estimation procedures are obtained under relaxed distributional and functional form assumptions allowing a researcher to incorporate more variability (or heterogeneity)."--from abstract.
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Title: Three essays on labor and health economics
Creator: Jun, Dajung
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Nonportable fringe benefits, such as health insurance and retirement benefits, can influence an individual's career decisions and financial well-being. To protect employee's utility, state and federal governments enacted policies that regulated these benefits. The first two chapters of my dissertation study two such policies: tax credits for private health insurance coverage and dependent coverage mandates that allowed young adults to be covered through their parents' insurance. I examine the...
Show moreNonportable fringe benefits, such as health insurance and retirement benefits, can influence an individual's career decisions and financial well-being. To protect employee's utility, state and federal governments enacted policies that regulated these benefits. The first two chapters of my dissertation study two such policies: tax credits for private health insurance coverage and dependent coverage mandates that allowed young adults to be covered through their parents' insurance. I examine the effects of these policies on several health and labor market outcomes. In the last chapter, my coauthor and I explore a slightly different perspective on fringe benefits. We examine to what extent lifetime earnings could explain the variation in wealth at retirement. By researching these topics, I contribute to the understanding of how fringe benefits and lifetime earnings affected outcomes of rational decision-making: health insurance take-up, job mobility and wealth accumulation.In chapter 1, I investigate the effectiveness of tax credits on health insurance premiums. There was a renewed interest in using tax credits to increase health insurance coverage after the push to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The Health Insurance Tax Credit (HITC) was implemented between 1991--1993 to reduce the burden of health insurance premiums primarily for low-income families. Although it was active for three years, this policy has been studied in only one previous study. In this chapter, I examine the effectiveness of the HITC by using the Survey of Income Program Participation (SIPP), and I provide the first estimates of its effects on healthcare utilization and self-reported health status. My results align with previous studies and suggest the HITC increased the health insurance take-up by 5.8 percentage points. The implementation of the HITC also significantly improved the self-reported health status of respondents.In the second chapter, I analyze the effects of dependent coverage mandates on working fathers' job mobility and compensation. Due to the low rates of health insurance coverage among young adults, some state governments began mandating health insurance companies to allow adult children to stay on their parents' health insurance plans. First implemented in 1995, these mandates aimed to increase health coverage among young adults. In 2010, the federal government enacted a more comprehensive version of the dependent coverage mandate as part of the Affordable Care Act. These state- and federal-level efforts successfully increased insurance rates for young adults, but they might have also come with unintended consequences for parents. Parents who placed a high value on health insurance for their young adult children might be reluctant to leave jobs with employer-provided health insurance, and employers might offset the mandated-incurred health care costs by reducing other types of employee benefits or earnings. To assess the extent of such consequences, I study the effects of both the state and federal dependent health insurance mandates on fathers. By analyzing the 2004 and 2008 SIPP panels, which are linked with Detailed Earnings Records and Business Registrar data from the United States Census, I examine the mandates' effects on fathers' voluntary job separation rates (job-lock and job-push) and changes in their compensation. After the implementation of the mandates, I observe a significant decrease in the likelihood of voluntary job separation among eligible working fathers aged 45--64 with employer-provided health insurance. Additionally for these fathers, except for those who separated from these jobs within the current wave, my analysis slightly evidences that the mandates reduced the total monetary compensation. In the last chapter, we investigate the impact of lifetime earnings on retirement wealth. Historically, many households accumulated substantial wealth by retirement, while many other households accumulated very little. Venti and Wise (1999, 2001) directly examine this question by utilizing data that was superior to that available to previous researchers and conclude that th03000300e bulk of the dispersion must be attributed to differences in the amount that households choose to save.'' In this paper, we examine the extent that a remaining problem in their data affected their results: Their measure of lifetime earnings, despite being based on administrative data, was subject to topcoding in each year. Using the 2001 SIPP that was not subject to the same problem, we find that the effect of the topcoding was substantial. At least 35 percent of individuals were misclassified in each of the top four deciles. When replicating a key result of Venti and Wise (2001), our findings suggest that the correlation between lifetime earnings and savings was about 50\\% greater than what was found when using censored deciles. This increased explanatory power came largely at the expense of the other variables in the regression model.
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Title: Essays on the economics of organ transplantation
Creator: Lemont, Bethany I.
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Chapter 1: The Effect of Share 35 for Kidneys on Pediatric Transplant Candidates: Due to the shortage of donated kidneys in the United States, allocation policy is used to balance equity and efficiency in distribution of these scarce resources. I analyze the effect of a change in the allocation system for deceased donor kidneys called "Share 35" that gave priority to pediatric kidney transplant candidates over adult candidates for young deceased donor kidneys. Using data from the Scientific...
Show moreChapter 1: The Effect of Share 35 for Kidneys on Pediatric Transplant Candidates: Due to the shortage of donated kidneys in the United States, allocation policy is used to balance equity and efficiency in distribution of these scarce resources. I analyze the effect of a change in the allocation system for deceased donor kidneys called "Share 35" that gave priority to pediatric kidney transplant candidates over adult candidates for young deceased donor kidneys. Using data from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients on all kidney transplant candidates in the US, I show that providing priority for pediatric candidates increased the average kidney quality by 30% and increased the likelihood of being transplanted within a year by 20 percentage points for pediatric candidates who are predicted to receive a deceased donor kidney in absence of Share 35. However, this policy also created an incentive for pediatric candidates with a living donor available to them to forgo using that donor to use a deceased donor instead. These candidates, who I estimate switch donor types, experience worse average kidney quality but no change in wait time. Additionally using the limited long run follow-up data available, the policy does not appear to have the unintended consequence of candidates with available living donors strategically "saving" their living donor for their second transplants when they would no longer have pediatric priority.Chapter 2: The Effects of the Affordable Care Act on the Demand for Organ Transplants: Many potential transplant candidates are unable to be registered on the wait list to receive an organ for transplant due to their lack of insurance. With the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, some of these potential candidates obtained insurance coverage through state Medicaid expansions or through the introduction of the private insurance marketplace. In this paper, I estimate the effect of this increase in availability of insurance coverage on these potential transplant candidates' wait list decisions and transplant outcomes using a difference in differences model. I find that the state expansions of Medicaid increased monthly wait list registrations by candidates insured through Medicaid by about 50 percent on average for all organs, but I find no effect of the marketplace on registrations. Additionally, I find that for candidates insured through Medicaid, the Medicaid expansion led to an increase in monthly deceased donor transplants for all organs, and a doubling of monthly living donor liver transplants.Chapter 3: Opioids and Organs: How Overdoses Affect the Supply of Donors,Waiting Lists, and Transplant Outcomes (with Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and Keith Teltser): As the number of fatal drug overdoses has rapidly grown in recent years, patients awaiting organ transplants may be the unintended beneficiaries. In 2017, 70,237 people died due to a drug overdose, 5,795 transplant candidates died while waiting for an organ, and an additional 6,363 candidates were removed from waiting lists because they were too sick to accept a transplant. In this paper, we use mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System, merged with restricted-use data on transplant candidates and recipients from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, to study the extent to which the recent growth in fatal drug overdoses impacts the supply of deceased organ donations and transplants. We find that each opioid overdose death generates 0.019 additional organ donors, resulting in 0.053 additional organ transplants. Nearly all of this association is concentrated among donors aged 18-49, who account for the majority of opioid overdose victims. Somewhat surprisingly, opioid-driven supply shocks induce limited demand-side responses.
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Title: Essays in grocery demand and food policy
Creator: Harris-Lagoudakis, Katherine
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Chapter 1: The Effect of Online Shopping on the Nutritional Content of Grocery Purchases: This chapter utilizes novel household panel data to analyze the effect of online grocery shopping on the healthiness of grocery purchases. In order to obtain a causal estimate of the impact of online grocery shopping on the nutritional content of grocery purchases, I utilize variation in the timing that an online shopping service was introduced as a source of exogenous variation in the decision to shop...
Show moreChapter 1: The Effect of Online Shopping on the Nutritional Content of Grocery Purchases: This chapter utilizes novel household panel data to analyze the effect of online grocery shopping on the healthiness of grocery purchases. In order to obtain a causal estimate of the impact of online grocery shopping on the nutritional content of grocery purchases, I utilize variation in the timing that an online shopping service was introduced as a source of exogenous variation in the decision to shop online. Local average treatment effects indicate that online shopping induces a 3.8, 5.9, 5.7 and 7.4 percent increase in the average budget shares for dairy, fruit, meats and vegetables, respectively. This reallocation of funds comes at the expense of drinks, oils and snacks/sweets with estimates indicating a 5.2, 4.1 and 13.6 percent decrease in the average budget shares, respectively. I also analyze the nutrient densities of grocery purchases and find a 4.2, 5.0, 5.8 and a 5.8 percent decrease in the average amount of calories, carbohydrates, fats and sugars contained in an ounce of food purchased, respectively. These insights into consumer purchasing behavior can be utilized to inform food policy aimed at improving the nutritional quality of food purchases.Chapter 2: The Effect of Online Shopping on Grocery Demand: This chapter analyzes the effect of shopping for groceries online on grocery demand. Utilizing variation in the timing that an online shopping service was introduced as a source of exogenous variation in the decision to shop online, I estimate a structural model of demand that allows the parameters of demand to vary with purchasing environments. I find that fifty-four percent of the estimated demand parameters are significantly different in months in which a household engages in online shopping. Comparisons of in-store and online price elasticities indicate that households are generally less price sensitive when shopping online. Specifically, I find that own-price (cross-price) elasticities are 1.2 (1.4) times larger in-store than they are online, on average. These insights into consumer purchasing behavior can be utilized to inform optimal web design and online pricing strategies.Chapter 3: What are SNAP Benefits Used to Purchase? Evidence from a Supermarket Retail Panel: This chapter analyzes what households utilize their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP or food stamp) benefits to purchase and relates these purchasing patterns to existing research that has explored the impact of SNAP on food spending, non-food spending and health outcomes. I utilize an event study approach that compares the purchasing patterns of a household immediately prior to SNAP adoption to the purchasing patterns of the same household immediately following SNAP adoption. I find that SNAP adoption almost exclusively increases spending on SNAP eligible items with the product categories of meat, oil and prepared foods experiencing the biggest growth in food expenditure. I also find that SNAP adoption is correlated with increased spending over baby products, while spending over alcohol and tobacco products exhibits almost no change.
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Title: Three essays on demand estimation
Creator: Zhou, Hang (Graduate of Michigan State University)
Date: 2019
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning both empirical studies and estimation mythologies of the discrete choice models in the area of demand estimation. The first chapter is a pure empirical study of estimating Chinese outbound tourism demand under a discrete choice model framework. The second chapter considers a mixture discrete choice model in which consumers have unobservable and heterogeneous choice sets and proposes a corresponding two-step mixture estimation approach....
Show more"This dissertation consists of three chapters concerning both empirical studies and estimation mythologies of the discrete choice models in the area of demand estimation. The first chapter is a pure empirical study of estimating Chinese outbound tourism demand under a discrete choice model framework. The second chapter considers a mixture discrete choice model in which consumers have unobservable and heterogeneous choice sets and proposes a corresponding two-step mixture estimation approach. The third chapter contains a set of simulation studies regarding the two-step mixture approach proposed in the second chapter. More specifically, the first chapter implements a discrete choice approach to estimate the determinants of Chinese outbound tourism demand after year 2004, since when Chinese citizens could travel to most major overseas destinations without political restrictions. Starting from travelers' utility specifications, this chapter implements basic linear regressions to estimate Chinese tourists' sensitivity to the cost of travel and other characteristics of the destinations. The price and income elasticities are estimated as well. This chapter also proposes a strategy to quantify the welfare gains of Chinese tourists from the opening of Taiwan (to mainland China) as a new destination. The second chapter proposes a two-step mixture approach to estimate discrete choice models when consumers' choice sets are unobservable and heterogeneous. Different choice sets are viewed as different consumer types. Each type of consumers has distinct criteria on the attributes of products according to which their choice sets are formatted. After assuming the choice set formation process, the choice sets distribution and preference parameters can be jointly estimated by a two-step mixture approach. A key insight is that the approach can be applied to store level data. While having individual level data is not a must, it can provide guidance on the formation of choice sets. The effectiveness of the proposed mixture approach is demonstrated via a set of Monte Carlo simulations and three empirical applications on markets of milk, potato chips and hot-dogs using the IRI marketing data. The third chapter is a follow-up of Chapter 2 and is based on more simulation studies. In this chapter I review the data generation process (DGP) of my mixture model, discuss the failure of another estimation method which depends on the BLP-type inversion under my DGP setup, and then conduct Monte Carlo simulation experiments to examine the validity of the two-step mixture approach and demonstrate its superiority over other traditional estimation methods under various scenarios."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Essays in public and health economics
Creator: Schuttringer, Ehren
Date: 2014
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation consists of three empirical studies in public and health economics. In the first chapter I use inpatient level hospital data to examine the effect of state tort reforms on physician behavior. For the second chapter, I evaluate the impact of a large expansion in public health insurance for children on the labor supply of single mothers. In the third chapter I describe trends in health insurance coverage during the Great Recession, and investigate the degree to which business...
Show moreThis dissertation consists of three empirical studies in public and health economics. In the first chapter I use inpatient level hospital data to examine the effect of state tort reforms on physician behavior. For the second chapter, I evaluate the impact of a large expansion in public health insurance for children on the labor supply of single mothers. In the third chapter I describe trends in health insurance coverage during the Great Recession, and investigate the degree to which business cycle variation accounts for the large decline in insurance coverage among adults during the recession. The first dissertation chapter explores the relationship between medical malpractice laws and the behavior of medical providers. Physician incentives in the current medical malpractice system may encourage socially wasteful behavior if doctors, out of liability concerns, provide medical services to patients of little benefit relative to the cost. Tort reform is often touted as a way to reduce liability induced provision of costly and unnecessary medical services. Empirical studies that assess the effect of tort reform on physician behavior offer mixed evidence of a behavioral response. Using a source of inpatient data not previously used in this literature, I investigate potential explanations for this lack of consensus. Results indicate some evidence that tort reforms influence physician behavior in a sample of heart attack patients, but not in a sample of stroke patients. These results are not robust to different specifications, however. I conclude that there is little evidence of a relationship between tort reform and hospital treatment for AMI or stroke.In the second chapter, I evaluate the implementation of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and its impact on the labor supply of single mothers. SCHIP, established in 1997, is an important source of health care access for children in near poor families. As with other means tested government programs, a worry is that program eligibility rules distort parental labor supply decisions. Because states have a large amount of flexibility in the design and administration of their SCHIP programs, there is considerable heterogeneity in state eligibility rules. Consequently, reduced form methods that associate SCHIP eligibility policies with labor supply must average outcomes over a diverse set of households with varying incentives for insurance coverage and employment. With data from the March Current Population Survey (CPS), I evaluate the program's effect on the labor supply using an instrumental variables estimation strategy that relates child insurance coverage with program eligibility rules. Results suggest that SCHIP led to an increase in public coverage and private insurance crowd-out, with no effects on maternal work behavior. For the third chapter, I investigate adult health insurance coverage during the Great Recession (2007-2009). The Great Recession is associated with large reductions in employment and health insurance coverage. However, it is not clear that the decline in health insurance coverage can be completely attributed to the recession. Using data from the CPS, I relate health insurance coverage for working age adults with state level measures of employment. Estimates from this model are used to generate out of sample predictions of health insurance coverage during the Great Recession. Results show that the proportion of adults without insurance coverage during the recession is greater than the level predicted by the regression model. These results are sensitive to different specifications of the model, however.
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Title: Essays on labor and demographic economics
Creator: Hsu, Hsiu-Fen
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation contains three self-contained chapters. The first chapter documents several changes that occurred in wage distribution in Taiwan between 1978 and 2012. For men, wage inequality narrowed initially, but then started widening. The declining wage inequality occurred evenly across the entire male wage distribution before the 1990s, when the economy was growing rapidly. Since the early 1990s, wage inequality among male workers has been rising, and the growth in inequality has been...
Show moreThis dissertation contains three self-contained chapters. The first chapter documents several changes that occurred in wage distribution in Taiwan between 1978 and 2012. For men, wage inequality narrowed initially, but then started widening. The declining wage inequality occurred evenly across the entire male wage distribution before the 1990s, when the economy was growing rapidly. Since the early 1990s, wage inequality among male workers has been rising, and the growth in inequality has been mainly due to expansion in upper-tail inequality. Around the same time, an increase in the college wage premium for male workers is also observed. Using a hybrid DFL reweighting approach, this study decomposes the changes in wage inequality into three main components: changes in the skill composition of the workforce, returns to skill, and residuals. The results show that for male workers, increases in returns to skill that arise from shifts in demand for skill play an important role in explaining the rising upper-tail wage inequality in the 1990s. By contrast, for female workers, changes in the skill composition of the workforce play an important role in explaining rising upper-tail inequality before the 1990s. The second chapter investigates how children's educational attainment varies by birth order. In the literature, high-income and middle- and low-income countries have been shown to have opposite educational outcomes with regard to birth order. Studies using data from high-income countries usually find that later-born children have an educational disadvantage; in contrast, studies using data from middle- and low-income countries find that later-born children have an educational advantage over earlier-born children. This study, however, finds that birth order-educational attainment patterns in high-income countries and Taiwan share some similarities: in smaller Taiwanese families, both later-born boys and girls have an educational disadvantage compared with their older siblings, a pattern typically found in high-income countries. This birth order pattern in smaller families also contradicts previous findings that later-born children receive more education in Taiwan. The final chapter explores wage behavior over business cycles in Taiwan. The results show that real wages during the Great Recession are procyclical, whereas real wages in the recession of the early 2000s are somewhat acyclical. The finding that real wages are more procyclical in the Great Recession than in the recession of the early 2000s is consistent with that in the U.K. The analysis also finds that the responses of real wages to cyclical fluctuations in the 2000s are similar among gender, education, and age groups.
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Title: Essays on the economics of organ transplantation
Creator: Teltser, Keith
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Addressing the increasingly unmet demand for transplantable kidneys in the U.S. requires creativity due to legislation that prohibits buying and selling organs. To increase the number of successful transplants that take place, transplant centers have begun to implement kidney exchange programs. In Chapter 1, I first estimate the number of additional transplants generated by kidney exchanges by analyzing how the probability of receiving an exchange transplant affects the probability that a...
Show moreAddressing the increasingly unmet demand for transplantable kidneys in the U.S. requires creativity due to legislation that prohibits buying and selling organs. To increase the number of successful transplants that take place, transplant centers have begun to implement kidney exchange programs. In Chapter 1, I first estimate the number of additional transplants generated by kidney exchanges by analyzing how the probability of receiving an exchange transplant affects the probability that a patient experiences other transplant outcomes, including death while waiting. To do this, I create a novel measure of exchange prevalence that exploits variation in exchange activity across time and transplant centers, as well as the importance of patient proximity to centers performing exchanges. I find that 6.2 of every 10 exchange transplants represent living donor transplants that would not have occurred in the absence of exchange. I also find that a ten percentage point increase in the probability of receiving an exchange transplant increases one-year and two-year graft survival by roughly 2.1 percent, and reduces waiting list registration duration by 10 percent.Since one of the purported benefits of kidney exchange is that it increases access to living donor transplants for hard-to-match patients, and given existing concerns in the transplant community about demographic disparities in transplant access and outcomes, in Chapter 2 I analyze the extent to which exchanges have differential impacts on transplant outcomes across patients of various blood types, levels of sensitivity to foreign organs, races, ages, and levels of education. To estimate the effects of interest, I exploit the importance of patient proximity to exchange centers in order to generate exogenous variation in the probability of receiving a transplant via exchange. The first main finding is that rising exchange prevalence tends to benefit harder-to-match blood types the least with respect to both quantity and quality of transplants, though they seem to have larger positive impacts on patients with higher (compared to lower) levels of senstitivity to foreign organs. The second main finding is that black patients and older patients experience the smallest gains in transplant quantity as exchange prevalence increases relative to other race and age groups, respectively.Because geography plays a key role in deceased donor organ allocation, shocks to the local supply of organs will likely affect transplant waitlists. In Chapter 3, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, and I use data on transplant recipients from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients to assess whether shifts in the supply of organs arising from changes in motorcycle helmet laws affect the behavior and outcomes of transplant candidates. We find that, following repeals of statewide motorcycle helmet laws, the local supply of transplantable organs from donors killed in motor vehicle accidents increases by nearly 20 percent. These supply shocks induce strong responses from transplant candidates: inflows to local transplant waitlists increase by 12 percent in the years following the repeal. These inflows are especially pronounced among those who live outside the local area, implying that in the absence of a formal pricing mechanism, waiting times for organs are the relevant “price” determining listing decisions. In addition, transplants from living donors decline following supply shocks, suggesting that the availability of transplants from living and deceased donors influence candidates’ decisions to seek organs from living donor. Finally, the average transplant is more successful following the increase in transplantable organs, as measured by the probability of the transplanted organ surviving at least one year. This quality improvement may explain the dramatic increases in wait lists to the areas with more organs.
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Title: Essays in public and labor economics
Creator: Brehm, Margaret Elizabeth
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Chapter 1: “State Responses to a Federal Matching Grant and Adoption from Foster Care.” The federal government reimburses states for adoption assistance – monthly cash subsidies – to families of children adopted from foster care through an open-ended matching grant. In this paper, I estimate the effect of states’ responses to the matching grant on foster children’s adoption outcomes. These outcomes are the likelihood of adoption, timing of adoption, and state designation of “special needs” to...
Show moreChapter 1: “State Responses to a Federal Matching Grant and Adoption from Foster Care.” The federal government reimburses states for adoption assistance – monthly cash subsidies – to families of children adopted from foster care through an open-ended matching grant. In this paper, I estimate the effect of states’ responses to the matching grant on foster children’s adoption outcomes. These outcomes are the likelihood of adoption, timing of adoption, and state designation of “special needs” to entitle children to federal grant support. To identify causal state responses, I exploit variation in children’s federal eligibility for grant support from expanded federal criteria introduced in 2010 that continues for children of different ages through 2018. First, I find that federal eligibility for federal grant support increases the probability of adoption only modestly, by about 9 percent. Second, I find the structure of the rollout of new criteria creates short-run distortions in state behavior with delays in adoptions for 1–3 months until children are of an age to qualify. Third, I do not find that state governments specifically designate children special needs to claim federal grant support. Overall, because the federal matching rates vary from 50 to 83 percent, representing large decreases in the state’s cost of adoption assistance, these results imply a small state response. Chapter 2: “The Effects of State Adoption Incentive Awards for Older Children on Adoptions from U.S. Foster Care.” This paper uses changes in the United States federal Adoption Incentives program in 2003 and 2008 to analyze states’ response to federal incentives to increase adoptions of children in the U.S. foster care system. The 2003 change introduced a $4,000 incentive paid to states for every adoption of a child aged 9 and older above a state-specific baseline number of adoptions. The 2008 change doubled this incentive to $8,000. I use a semi-parametric hazard model to compare the probability of adoption and timing of adoption among children aged above and below 9 years old in the time periods before and after the 2003 and 2008 changes. I do not find robust evidence that the incentives for older child adoptions resulted in increases in adoptions for older children. The findings illustrate the incentives are unable to help states overcome many of the challenges associated with achieving adoption for older children. Chapter 3: “Capitalization of Charter Schools into Residential Property Values.” While prior research has found clear impacts of schools and school quality on property values, little is known about whether charter schools have similar effects. Using sale price data for residential properties in Los Angeles County from 2008 to 2011 we estimate the neighborhood level impact of charter schools on housing prices. Using an identification strategy that relies on census block fixed-effects and variation in charter penetration over time, we find little evidence that the availability of a charter school affects housing prices on average. However, we do find that when restricting to districts other than Los Angeles Unified and counting only charter schools located in the same school district as the household, housing prices fall in response to an increase in nearby charter penetration.
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Title: Three essays in labor economics
Creator: Vosters, Kelly Noud
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The first chapter tests a recently proposed hypothesis regarding rates of social mobility. Recent work by Gregory Clark and coauthors uses a new surnames approach to examine intergenerational mobility, finding much higher persistence rates than traditionally estimated. Clark proposes a model of social mobility to explain the diverging estimates, including the crucial but untested assumption that traditional estimates of intergenerational persistence are biased downward because they use only...
Show moreThe first chapter tests a recently proposed hypothesis regarding rates of social mobility. Recent work by Gregory Clark and coauthors uses a new surnames approach to examine intergenerational mobility, finding much higher persistence rates than traditionally estimated. Clark proposes a model of social mobility to explain the diverging estimates, including the crucial but untested assumption that traditional estimates of intergenerational persistence are biased downward because they use only one measure (e.g., earnings) of underlying status. I test for evidence of this using an approach from Lubotsky and Wittenberg (2006), incorporating information from multiple measures into an estimate of intergenerational persistence with the least attenuation bias. Contrary to Clark's prediction, I do not find evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates.The second chapter, coauthored with Martin Nybom, further examines this hypothesis using rich administrative data for Sweden. We exploit detailed proxy measures to test the proposition regarding attenuation bias in prior estimates for Sweden, and also conduct a Sweden-U.S. comparison. We find no evidence of substantial bias in prior estimates, or that the Sweden-U.S. difference in persistence is smaller than found in previous research. We further explore the concept of family status by incorporating mothers, thereby also contributing to the literature on intergenerational transmission for women. We find that while mothers’ income is a poor proxy for status, incorporating information on mothers’ occupation improves the ability to capture transmission from mothers to both sons and daughters.The third chapter, coauthored with Cassandra Guarino and Jeffrey Wooldridge, examines the SAS® EVAAS® models for estimating teacher effectiveness, which are used by several states and districts in teacher evaluation programs despite little attention in the evaluation literature. The EVAAS approach involves using one of two distinct models, the Multivariate Response Model (MRM) or the Univariate Response Model (URM). The MRM jointly models scores from multiple subjects, grades, and cohorts in a 5-year period; it is generally limited to within-district purposes due to the large computational burden and is sometimes not feasible if data requirements cannot be met. Hence, the URM was developed for these situations. The URM models a single subject, and thus is less intensive computationally and more flexible with respect to data requirements. The method involves the computation of a composite score on several lagged scores in multiple subjects, and then using this composite score as the only regressor in empirical Bayes’ estimation of the teacher effects. In this paper, we discuss and illustrate advantages and disadvantages of the EVAAS approach relative to the other widely used and studied value-added methods. We perform simulations to evaluate their ability to uncover true teacher effects under various teacher assignment scenarios. We also use administrative data to illustrate the extent of agreement between the URM and other common value-added approaches. Although the differences are small in our administrative data, we show with theory and simulations that standard linear regression using OLS performs at least as well as—and sometimes better than—the more complicated EVAAS URM.
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Title: Essays on foreign banking and international shock transmission
Creator: Belton, Daniel Joseph
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Foreign banking has grown considerably over the past two decades, as has interest in its costs and benefits by academics and policymakers alike. The flow of bank capital and liquidity across borders can transmit a domestic shock globally or mitigate the effects a domestic shock. In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature on the costs and benefits of foreign banking in three chapters. In the first chapter, I analyze the responses of banks in the United States to a funding shock...
Show moreForeign banking has grown considerably over the past two decades, as has interest in its costs and benefits by academics and policymakers alike. The flow of bank capital and liquidity across borders can transmit a domestic shock globally or mitigate the effects a domestic shock. In this dissertation, I contribute to the literature on the costs and benefits of foreign banking in three chapters. In the first chapter, I analyze the responses of banks in the United States to a funding shock generated by the 2011 FDIC assessment base change. Following the shock, insured banks found wholesale funding more costly, while uninsured branches of foreign banks enjoyed cheaper access to these funding sources. Using quarterly bank balance sheet statements and hand-matched borrowers and lenders from a syndicated loan-level database, we create a novel dataset with rich borrower and lender data. Uninsured banks which faced a relatively positive shock accumulated more reserves, but extended fewer loans and became more passive in the syndicated loan deals in which they participated. This contradicts much of the literature on internal capital markets of banks which find that foreign banks can insulate an economy from a domestic shock by extending loans.The second chapter addresses the issue of inadequate bank-level data capturing global foreign banking exposures. Despite the rising importance and growing interest in global foreign banking, comprehensive bank-level datasets measuring cross-border banking remain elusive. I construct a novel dataset covering foreign-owned banks between the United States and the European Union, Latin America, and Japan. My dataset contains detailed balance sheet information for individual depository institutions operating abroad. I compare the coverage of my dataset to that of an existing global foreign bank ownership database to show that my dataset improves in its coverage of pertinent foreign banks. I discuss some trends in foreign banking by U.S.-owned banks in Europe, Latin America, and Japan and banks operating in the U.S. owned by institutions in these regions.The third chapter analyzes the dataset compiled in chapter 2 as well as a complementary aggregate country-level dataset in order to examine foreign banking trends. Specifically, these datasets inform several stylized facts regarding the drivers between foreign banking between the United States and three regions: Europe, Latin America, and Japan. This level of data is necessary to distinguish between three main types of foreign banking: direct cross-border lending, the establishment or acquisition of foreign subsidiary banks, and the establishment of foreign branches.
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Title: Three essays in finance
Creator: Baik, Jaemin
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "Chapter 1, using individual Korean bank loans outstanding data by loans sector, calculates the intensity of herding for lending to specific sector as well as overall lending market by a way of two methods. By looking at the time series pattern of two measures, I examine the change in banks' lending behavior. With the results from two measures, I try to find empirical evidence of significant herding in the past and find some features related to the herd behavior. Also, using the loans data by...
Show more"Chapter 1, using individual Korean bank loans outstanding data by loans sector, calculates the intensity of herding for lending to specific sector as well as overall lending market by a way of two methods. By looking at the time series pattern of two measures, I examine the change in banks' lending behavior. With the results from two measures, I try to find empirical evidence of significant herding in the past and find some features related to the herd behavior. Also, using the loans data by industry, I investigate further rationality of herding by calculating after adjustment LSV measure to exclude industry-specific rational factor from before adjustment LSV measure. Finally, using one of measures which allows us to get the intensity of individual economic agents, this paper empirically analyze the factors that intensify Korean bank's herding. The result implies that significant extent of herding was followed by Korean banks for lending to both overall lending market and household sector during 2002-2003, and in lending to SME, the herding is considered to have been greatly intensified around 2003 and during 2006 and 2008. In addition, herding tends to get most intensified during times when banks change their lending decisions under the increased uncertainty about expectation for economic conditions. The extent to which the bank characteristics and structural/macroeconomic factors affect the herding intensity seems to vary by the lending sectors. Chapter 2 investigate whether the bank health and the credit shock to the bank affects its client firm's export using firm-level data for Korean firms, bank-level data on Korean banks, and matched bank-firm loans data during the period 2010-2013. Also, by adding the interaction term between the bank health and the ownership concentration measure, the analysis is extended to test the role of the ownership structure for the firm. I find that the more shares of the firm are held by the family members, the more likely that firm is to participate in the exports activity. It also implies that the more shareholdings by the family members helps the firm's export activity more resilient when financial health of banks from which the firm borrows get worse. It is not only financial health of its main bank, but also that of all other creditor banks that affects the firm's export activity. Also, when separating the effects transmitted by main bank and other banks at the same time, the main bank plays more significant role than other creditor banks. Chapter 3 explores the extensive literatures on the effects of the financial shocks and the corporate governance on the firm's real activities. With the growing interest in the global trade collapse after the financial crisis, I am focusing on the impact on the firm's exports. There have been many studies regarding transmission of financial shocks to banks to the firm's real activity and how the quality of the ownership structure affects the firm's decision and dynamics. I explore them and summarize the findings in this paper."--Page ii-iii.
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Title: Essays on trade, immigration, and labor market shocks
Creator: Lee, Kyu Yub
Date: 2015
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: This dissertation comprises three essays on trade, immigration, and labor market shocks. Its ultimate focus is to understand how domestic workers respond to and/or are affected by trade liberalization, immigration, and shocks to foreign labor markets. Depending on the purpose of each essay, workers are characterized as being identical, or as having different ages and abilities, or as possessing different skills. Each essay builds a theoretical model and undertakes its analysis by elucidating...
Show moreThis dissertation comprises three essays on trade, immigration, and labor market shocks. Its ultimate focus is to understand how domestic workers respond to and/or are affected by trade liberalization, immigration, and shocks to foreign labor markets. Depending on the purpose of each essay, workers are characterized as being identical, or as having different ages and abilities, or as possessing different skills. Each essay builds a theoretical model and undertakes its analysis by elucidating how asset values, wages, and/or unemployment change in general equilibrium.The first essay ``Trade, Welfare, and International Labor Market Spillovers'' examines welfare implications of trade liberalization and spillover effects of labor market shocks in a global economy. It proposes a two-country new trade theory framework with two types of labor (skilled and unskilled) combind with an imperfect labor market arising from country-specific real minimum wages. The model identifies two key forces that shape the results: i) external scale effects generating employment expansion among unskilled workers, and ii) wage effects arising from intensive use of skilled workers. The model provides three clear predictions. First, the introduction of trade results in a rise of wage inequality in both countries. Second, trade enhances welfare by lowering unemployment across countries only when external scale effects dominate. Third, when wage effects outweigh external scale effects, a country will be better off if the other country raises its minimum wage, but both countries will be worse off under unduly strong external scale effects in the global economy. The second essay ``Immigration, Firm Heterogeneity, and Welfare'' studies the impact of immigration on firm adjustment and on native workers' welfare. Heterogeneous immigrants are added to the standard monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms. Based on interaction between idiosyncratic firm productivity and immigrants who differ in terms of ability (or skill) and legality, the model shows: (i) under some reasonable conditions, the highest-productivity firms prefer highly-skilled immigrants relative to native workers despite high fixed cost, whereas the lowest-productivity firms are willing to employ illegal immigrants despite risk of being fined; (ii) illegal immigration lowers the productivity cutoff and, at the same time, highly-skilled immigration raises it via the exit/entry process of firms; (iii) immigration alters the equilibrium distribution of firms and average productivity, thereby influencing revenues and profits of average productivity firms; and (iv) average productivity affected by both types of immigration determines native workers' welfare in the long-run.Finally, the third essay ``Worker Heterogeneity and Adjustment to Trade Liberalization'' investigates trade liberalization's impact on heterogeneous workers. This essay focuses on the role of age together with ability of workers in a search and matching model of the labor market. In essence, the model shows that age and ability are substitutes. As a result, the asset value of an unemployed worker decreases as he/she ages, but increases in ability. When an economy enjoys a comparative advantage in the high-tech sector and protects the low-tech sector by tariff, trade liberalization reduces an unemployed worker's asset value in the low-tech sector and raises her/his asset value in the high-tech sector. The model explains that trade liberalization leads younger and/or abler workers who otherwise are stuck in the low-tech sector to switch sectors, although not all movers become winners, while simultaneously it forces older and/or less able workers to exit the labor force.
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Title: Essays on labor market and education
Creator: Kim, Soobin
Date: 2016
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: The first essay "Intergenerational Mobility in Korea'' investigates intergenerational earnings mobility in Korea for sons born between 1958 and 1973 and compares Korea's mobility to that of other nations. It uses data from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study and the Household Income and Expenditure Survey conducted by the Korean National Statistics Bureau. Since no single Korean dataset includes information on both sons' and their fathers' adult earnings, this study follows the two-sample...
Show moreThe first essay "Intergenerational Mobility in Korea'' investigates intergenerational earnings mobility in Korea for sons born between 1958 and 1973 and compares Korea's mobility to that of other nations. It uses data from the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study and the Household Income and Expenditure Survey conducted by the Korean National Statistics Bureau. Since no single Korean dataset includes information on both sons' and their fathers' adult earnings, this study follows the two-sample approach previously applied in Korea by Ueda (2013), whose estimated intergenerational earnings elasticity is 0.22, and extends the analysis by using fathers' earnings from more approximal cohort. The estimate of around 0.4 is similar to estimates for some already-developed countries and smaller than typical estimates for recently-developing countries.The second essay "College Enrollment over the Business Cycle: The Role of Supply Constraints'' studies the impact of supply constraints on cyclicality in enrollment. Many studies on cyclicality of higher education examine the relationship between cyclical variation in labor market conditions, and changes in enrollment. Changes in enrollment are caused by changes on both the demand side and the supply side. However, much of the previous literature implicitly assumed elastic supply of enrollment. This study identifies institutions with supply constraints and investigates how those constraints have affected institutionsdecisions on enrollment, and how such effects vary across institutions. I find that, in the short run, institutions are different in capacity to absorb additional students, so that recessions have heterogeneous effects on enrollment size and on freshman achievement. During recessions, some capacity constrained institutions increase enrollment less than proportionately to the increase in the number of applications and, as a result, increase their admissions selectivity. Other institutions respond to increase in demand by accepting more students, resulting in a drop in new-student achievement. Finally, the third essay "Racial Differences in Course-taking and Achievement Gap'' investigates the black-white differences in course-taking and achievement in high school. Despite the overall increase in course-taking intensity in the last two decades, the achievement gap between black and white high-school students has persisted. Using nationally-representative data, this study examines racial differences in the course-taking pattern and its association with the achievement gap. Initial results show a racially-different course-taking pattern in mathematics courses, in that white students are more likely to be enrolled in advanced courses than black students are, in all high-school years, and that the difference begins occurring in the first mathematics course, and increases over the years. Moreover, the black-white test-score gap in Grade 12 differs by course level and by school year of mathematics course taken.
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Title: Essays on unemployment insurance and labor market
Creator: Huang, Po-Chun
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: "This dissertation consists of three chapters studying the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) on the behavior of workers and employers. The first chapter investigates how the low UI tax base in the United States creates a disincentive to hire low wage workers and by how much. In the United States, unemployment benefits are funded by a payroll tax levied on wages below a given ceiling. With this limit, the earnings of low-wage workers are taxed more heavily than are the earnings of high...
Show more"This dissertation consists of three chapters studying the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) on the behavior of workers and employers. The first chapter investigates how the low UI tax base in the United States creates a disincentive to hire low wage workers and by how much. In the United States, unemployment benefits are funded by a payroll tax levied on wages below a given ceiling. With this limit, the earnings of low-wage workers are taxed more heavily than are the earnings of high-wage workers. I offer evidence on the employment effects of the low UI tax base by exploiting state variation in the UI tax base over 30 years. Using a difference-in-differences design and data from the Current Population Survey, I estimate that indexing the tax base increases the teenage employment rate by about 2-3 percentage points, and doubling the tax base in the non-indexed states is estimated to raise the teenage employment rate by about 4 percentage points. These results offer evidence that the erosion of the real UI tax base has reduced the employment of low-wage workers. The second chapter uses administrative unemployment insurance (UI) data and an unemployment benefits extension for workers aged 45 or older in Taiwan to estimate the effects of extended benefits on unemployment duration and reemployment outcomes. Using a regression discontinuity design, we estimate that a 90-day increase in potential duration increases the insured duration by 57 days and the nonemployment duration by 41 days. While we do not find wage gains overall for UI recipients around 45 years old, the benefits extension is estimated to increase the reemployment wage for the lower-wage workers, who are most likely to exhaust their benefits. Our findings suggest that the liquidity constraints at the exhaustion point might play an important role in the effect of a benefit extension on job match quality. The third chapter estimates the effects of the Taiwanese reemployment bonus program on the timing of reemployment. The reemployment bonus in Taiwan has a unique structure--it offers 50% of the remaining UI entitlements to workers who become reemployed before exhausting their unemployment benefits. We exploit variation in bonus offer around the time the bonus was introduced to identify the incentive effects of the bonus program. Using administrative UI claim and corresponding earning records, we find that the bonus program in Taiwan provides unemployed workers strong incentives to accept reemployment--the program is estimated to increase the monthly hazard (conditional probability) of reemployment by nearly 7 percentage points (on a base of about 10 percent) in the first month of a nonemployment spell, and by 6.6 percentage points (on a base of about 9 percent) in the second month of a nonemployment spell (see Table 3.3). These are large increases in both absolute and relative terms--that is, they represent increases in the conditional probability of becoming reemployed of 68 percent and 75 percent in the first two months of nonemployment. Consistent with the declining bonus offer schedule, the estimated bonus effect on the monthly reemployment hazard gradually declines and disappears after the eighth month of the nonemployment spell."--Pages ii-iii.
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Title: Essays in the economics of caste and religion
Creator: Alvi, Muzna Fatima
Date: 2017
Collection: Electronic Theses & Dissertations
Description: Through my dissertation, I aim to uncover the processes that govern the relationship between social or ethnic identity and economic outcomes such as employment and education. I focus in particular on studying outcomes for Muslim women in India who have remained on the fringes of economic enquiry. A majority of the literature on economic exclusion in India has focused on caste based discrimination, which is warranted given the acute poverty and deprivation faced by lower caste communities in...
Show moreThrough my dissertation, I aim to uncover the processes that govern the relationship between social or ethnic identity and economic outcomes such as employment and education. I focus in particular on studying outcomes for Muslim women in India who have remained on the fringes of economic enquiry. A majority of the literature on economic exclusion in India has focused on caste based discrimination, which is warranted given the acute poverty and deprivation faced by lower caste communities in the country. However, despite being comparable on measures of economic, social and educational deprivation, Indian Muslims have remained absent from the development discourse in the country. I hope my research will contribute to filling this lacuna in the literature.The first chapter examines the evolution of labor force participation rate (LFPR) differences between women from the Hindu, Schedule Caste/Schedule Tribe (SC/ST) and Muslim communities in India. I find that affirmative action policies have led to convergence in the education levels of Hindus and SC/ST which has consequently led to a narrowing of the LFPR gap of the two groups, however, the Hindu-Muslim gap in female labor participation remains persistently high. I find that part of the religious gap is explained due to Muslim women being trapped in enclaves of low economic development due to a combination of Muslim ghettoization and relatively localized marriage markets. Contrary to popular rhetoric, I find that culture does not play a big role in explaining the absence of Muslim women from the labor force. In the second chapter my coauthor Dr Maitreyi Bordia Das and I, study the causes for large differences in female labor force participation between West Bengal and Bangladesh. Despite historical and cultural commonalities, both regions exhibit very different levels of socio-economic development, one of which is the wide disparity in female labor force participation. We find that observable covariates do not play a major role in explaining the wide gap in female LFPR between the two regions. This is driven by the fact that in West Bengal, much like the rest of India, higher levels of education and improvements in social status leads to withdrawal of women from the labor force. On the other hand, we find the opposite to be true in Bangladesh. In comparing Muslims on either side of the border, our results remain qualitatively similar to the aggregate results. We conclude that the differing political trajectories followed by the two regions have created widely varying economic structures which have in turn led to divergent demands for female labor in the two countries- the most obvious of which is the decline of agriculture in West Bengal and the continued flourishing of both agriculture and manufacturing in Bangladesh. The third chapter aims to study the impact of communal violence in India on the schooling and education decisions of Muslims in India. The causes and consequences of violent conflict, particularly civil war, mass violence and ethnic conflict, has attracted considerable scholarly attention across disciplines. However, there is much less research on the how small isolated and geographically dispersed incidences of violence can lead to long term deficit in human capital accumulation for entire communities. This effect could be driven by the immediate loss of life and livelihood following conflict. However, repeated conflict also ingrains a culture of fear in the minds of the victimized community that implicitly determines economic behavior in the long-run. My paper deals with one such group, namely Indian Muslim. I use data on religious violence from 1950-2006 combined with data on education from several consecutive rounds of the National Sample Survey (NSS) on Employment and Unemployment (Schedule 10) and Participation in Education (Schedule 25.2) covering the period between 1983 and 2014. My results suggest that both contemporaneous and cumulative violence has no effect on the educational outcomes and dropout decision of Muslim girls and boys.
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