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Essays In Applied Microeconomics And Finance
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Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Finance by : Emanuela Maria Iancu
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Finance written by Emanuela Maria Iancu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topics covered in this paper cover a broad range of subjects, from a reputation system in a discrete and infinite time model over to a three period game on a network and concluding with the optimal default decision in continuous time framework. The first paper, entitled "Firms' Strategic Competition and The Dynamics of Reputation: The Case of an Online Market", a joint work with Clodomiro Ferreira, analyzes, both theoretically and quantitatively, how sellers strategic competition for high valuation buyers in a context resembling on-line markets shapes reputation building incentives, and how it determines the dynamics of prices and reputation itself. The second paper, joint work with Agnese Leonello, investigates interbank market freeze and contagion that arises through asset sales in a financial network in which mark-to-market is the accounting standard in place. The paper develops a simple three-period theoretical model in which banks can borrow liquidity on the interbank market or sell assets at fire sale prices to meet their liquidity needs. Interbank market freeze and contagion arise in equilibrium as consequence of uncertainty of the counterparty risk and miscoordination in the sell of assets. Finally, the third paper written together with Mariana Khapko analyzes the issue of debt overhang in a Leland(1994) type of model and shows how the presence of a credit rating agency can mitigate this problem to some extent. Our results point out to the fact that a firm with performance sensitive debt in place might find it worthwhile to invest earlier in better projects whenever the investment reduces the coupon payments. The effect of the credit rating agency's policy in the underinvestment issue is nevertheless non-monotonic.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Behavioral Finance by : Marco Giovanni Nieddu
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Behavioral Finance written by Marco Giovanni Nieddu and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 141 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, I investigate how promo-tion incentives affect the performance of high-skilled public employees. I study a centralized evaluation process awarding the eligibility for associate and full pro-fessorship in Italian academia, and show that the perspective of a promotion in-duces scholars to increase their research productivity. In the second chapter, I present the results from a laboratory experiment designed to assess whether and how financial literacy influences the way individuals perceive and evaluate finan-cial assets. By comparing participants' investment decisions under different treat-ments, I show that the lack of financial literacy lowers the subjective value that investors assign to risky financial assets. The third and last chapter is devoted to an empirical analysis of the link between university quality and employment opportunities. I find that postgraduate students who receive incentives to attend higher-ranked universities are more likely to be employed one year and a half after the end of their studies.
Book Synopsis Incentives in Financial and Behavioral Economics by : Florian Hett
Download or read book Incentives in Financial and Behavioral Economics written by Florian Hett and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis deals with the empirical identification of incentive effects in various settings.The central chapter looks at the financial crisis of 2007-2009 and the incentive effects caused by policy interventions in financial markets. A hypothesis controversially discussed by academics as well as policy makers is that public bailouts for banks destroy market discipline, that is the incentives for decentralized monitoring by market participants. In turn, this might induce stronger risk-taking by banks and finally make future crises more likely and severe. The thesis describes a new methodology to identify this effect and shows that market discipline strongly deteriorated during the crisis period. In additional chapters, this thesis empirically identifies incentive effects in dynamic contest situations.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by :
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The average microenterprise in a developing country may have very high marginal returns to capital, according to several recent studies. Financial constraints are part of the explanation for how these high returns persist. But, given these constraints, it remains to explain the limited self-financing by the households running these businesses. In particular, little is known about the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) of poor households, which describes how quickly households save in response to rates of return higher than their rate of time preference. If poorer households have a lower EIS, reflecting the difficulty of reducing their already low consumption to finance investment, they will save slowly in response to high returns despite having a normal rate of time preference. However, separately identifying the EIS from the discount rate is difficult because it requires variation in the returns to capital, which is not present in many data sets. I examine extant data on microenterprises in Sri Lanka, including the results of a field experiment distributing grants to a random selection of firms, which aids in identifying households' varying returns to capital. I document gradual investment by most firms in response to their very high returns. I tentatively estimate the EIS of these households to be 0.03, substantially lower than recent estimates around 0.7 for US and UK households. The main implication is that households invest cash grants productively with persistent benefits rather than consuming them away shortly after receiving them. The second essay examines the impact of labor market frictions on the equilibrium relationship between wages and non-pecuniary job characteristics. It analyzes a model with firm-side heterogeneity in both absolute productivity and marginal cost of providing job amenities. In a search equilibrium in which all firms make equal profits, firms providing greater non-pecuniary job amenities have incentives to offer higher overall utility to workers. Thus workers at lower amenity levels are impeded from advancing to preferred positions with better amenities. This positive correlation between amenity level and utility contrasts with the frictionless framework in which all workers weakly prefer their current job to all available alternatives.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Aviva Aron-Dine
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Aviva Aron-Dine and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters on topics in applied microeconomics. In the first chapter. I investigate whether voters are more likely to support additional spending on local public services when they perceive current service quality to be high. My empirical strategy exploits discontinuities in the Texas school ratings formula that create quasi-random variation in perceptions about school quality. I find that receiving an "exemplary" versus a "recognized" rating increases support for a school district's bond measures by about 10 percentage points. Voters respond to the level of a district's rating. not just to whether the district has improved or slipped. I develop and implement a test for whether these patterns of voter behavior lead to efficient outcomes; however, the results are inconclusive. The second chapter. written jointly with Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Mark Cullen. investigates whether individuals exhibit forward looking behavior in their response to the nonlinear pricing common in health insurance contracts. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that employees who join an employer-provided health insurance plan later in the calendar year face the same initial price of medical care but a higher expected end-of-year price than employees who join the same plan earlier in the year. Our results reject the null of completely myopic behavior; medical utilization appears to respond to the future price, with a statistically significant elasticity of medical utilization with respect to the future price of -0.4 to -0.6. To try to quantify the extent of forward looking behavior., we develop a stylized dynamic model of individual behavior and calibrate it using our estimated behavioral response and additional data from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment. Our calibration suggests that the elasticity estimate may be substantially smaller than the one implied by fully forward-looking behavior, yet it is sufficiently high to have an economically significant effect on the response of annual medical utilization to a non-linear health insurance contract. Overall. our results point to the empirical importance of accounting for dynamic incentives in analyses of the impact of health insurance on medical utilization. In the third chapter. I exploit a discontinuity in federal financial aid rules at age 24 to estimate the effect of financial aid on college enrollment. school choice. and persistence and degree completion rates. Undergraduate students who are not married and do not have children are classified as "dependent" or "independent" for purposes of federal financial aid based on whether they have turned 24 as of January 1 of the "award year." Independent students qualify for additional grant aid and are eligible to take out much larger federal loans. Using data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study and the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study. I show that average grant aid per student increases by about $1.100. or 55%. at age 24. while 12% of students take advantage of the higher federal loan limits. Estimates of the effects of additional aid on enrollment, persistence. and degree completion are inconclusive; while not statistically significant. they do not allow me to rule out sizable effects. I do find evidence of an increase in enrollment at for-profit colleges. concentrated among students whose parents are not college graduates.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Ioana Sofia Pacurar
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Ioana Sofia Pacurar and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This doctoral dissertation comprises essays in Applied Microeconomics with focus in Health and Regional Economics. The first investigates a neo-classical hospital production model for cost and quality implications by payment source in the context of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The second essay demonstrates positive crime effects induced by Hurricane Katrina population migration. Specifically, the first essay evaluates hospital cost efficiecies emanating from changes in public reimbursement levels and/or shifts in hospital care demand or health care budgets. Using 2000-2008 data from Tennessee Joint Annual Reports of Hospitals, hybrid generalized translog multi-product cost functions were estimated with controls for multi-dimensional quality, diagnostic mix, and hopital heterogeneity. The production technology cost model, accounting for technological change and geographic effects, was estimated using the Iterative Seemingly Unrelated Regression methodology. Factor demand elasticities, alternative conceptual measures of the elasticites of substitution, scale and scope economies were evaluated. This is the first study to quantify opportunities for exploiting scope economies by payer type (e.g., Medicaid/Tenncare with private payers). Policy implications were explored. Using a natural experiment, the second essay tests an empirical link between the forced evacuation and crime types countrywide and in Houston, TX, while avoiding concerns of endogeneity due to selection or simultaneity. Few prior economic studies of Katrina probed impacts on host labor markets or on evacuees' labor and schooling outcomes, overlooking potential effects on local crime in spite of anecdotal evidence. To ensure identification with a Difference-in-Difference specification, the number of evacuees going to a metropolitan area was instrumented by its distance to New Orleans, LA. Katrina immigration was found to rise the incidence of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, robbery, and motor vehicle theft. The analysis of Houston post-shelter consequences of Katrina on crime showed increases murder, aggravated assault, illegal possession of weapons, and arson. While the regional analysis was based on the Current Population Survey and data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Houston study used data provided by the Police Department. Robustness checks evaluating self-selection utilized the Displaced New Orleans Resident Pilot survey. It remained undetermined whether the crimes were committed by the evacuees, or triggered by their presence.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Jean-Louis Barnwell Ménard
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Jean-Louis Barnwell Ménard and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This thesis studies household and education economics, focusing on child development, parental investment, housing, and schooling. The first chapter studies the role of parental investments in explaining cognitive skills disparities across children from the same family. Siblings compete for limited parental time and financial resources, so that investments available to each child decline as the number of children in the family increases. This resource dilution is present for secondborns throughout their life, whereas firstborns have the natural advantage of experiencing a period alone with parents. This paper shows that resource dilution is a quantitively convincing mechanism to explain why firstborn children tend to outperform their secondborn siblings on cognitive exams. Structural estimates of the child quality production function suggest an extra (counterfactual) year alone with parents for the firstborn leads to a 0.12 standard deviation increase of the birth order gap in child quality between the ages of 6 and 12. This effect accounts for a little over one third of the observed gap in cognitive ability test scores for a US representative sample of two-child families of white mothers from the (C)NLSY79. Investment spillovers between siblings add to the dynamic impacts of resource dilution and make the uplift of the firstborn's relative position persist over time.From an investment perspective or to adapt the living space for the need of a family, households typically buy or/and sell a home on multiple occasions throughout their lifetime. The second chapter studies how algorithm-based market valuations for houses, such as Zillow's Zestimate, impact trading outcomes in the housing market. Sellers who advertise an asking price below their Zestimate increase buyers' search intensity, shorten their time on market and reduce their sales price, irrespectively of sellers' preferences and home characteristics. Using data about the home selling process on Zillow in the Seattle metropolitan area, we estimate the cost associated with this trade-off is 3,600 dollars (0.75 percent) of the house sales price for one fewer day on market. Despite this high cost, we show that it is still rational for a seller to advertise an asking price below the Zestimate if there exists a distance between his reservation value and the Zestimate. Our model implies that heterogeneity in house trading outcomes can arise from homogenous sellers' (mis)fortune in receiving a low or a high Zestimate.Outside of the home, children spend most of their time in a classroom environment with their peers and teacher. Evidence from the well-known experimental STAR project suggests lower class size (student-teacher ratio) improves children's math and reading abilities. However, previous studies do not adequately address selection issues related to the severe attrition in this experiment. The third chapter focuses on efficient estimation of parameters in generic target (sub) populations defined by the missingness pattern of monotonically missing at random data. Attrition from multi-period studies typically generates such data and, in such contexts, our target parameters describe, e.g., the counterfactuals that were unrealized due to the choice of attrition in different periods. The novel features of the results on efficiency are emphasized. We revisit the STAR project and estimate an effect of small class size on grade 3 reading scores of more than 30 percent higher than if we rely exclusively on students who did not leave the experiment. A decomposition of the effect across cohorts of students leaving the experiment after different grades suggests mitigating actions from underperforming students assigned to not-small classes"--
Book Synopsis Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Albert Haewon Choi
Download or read book Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Albert Haewon Choi and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a contract is signed between two economic agents, it is likely to produce some effect on non-contracting, third parties and provide new information to the contracting parties. This thesis examines how such third party externality and newly generated information should affect the initial form of the contract. In the first essay, a headquarters of a firm designs a mechanism with which it extracts the division managers' superior information about the external market opportunities. The information allows the headquarters to provide optimal investment incentive to the managers and make efficient trading decisions. The essay provides a justification for a real-world headquarters, who delegates all the operating decisions to the division managers but maintains the ultimate authority within the firm. The second essay examines how a client would contract with her lawyer to provide best incentive to the lawyer and maximize her return from litigation. By providing different contingent shares based on settlement and judgment, she is able to provide better incentive without diluting her return from litigation. At the same time, when she has relatively poor bargaining leverage against the counter party, the essay shows that delegating the settlement authority to the lawyer and leaving him a large rent would be more beneficial for the client. The third essay analyzes the salary contracting problem faced by the owner of a firm who is aware of a potential opportunity to sell her firm in the future. The essay demonstrates that when the owner grants a large severance payment to the employee, she would be able to defer the compensation burden to the potential buyer and increase her net return from the firm.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Mitchell H. Hoffman
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Mitchell H. Hoffman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. All are in personnel economics, using data from the trucking industry. Training by firms is a central means by which workers accumulate human capital, yet firms may be reluctant to train if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. "Training contracts" that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. The first essay from this dissertation studies training contracts in the U.S. trucking industry where they are widely used, focusing on data from one leading firm. Exploiting two plausibly exogenous contract changes that introduced penalties for quitting, I confirm that training contracts significantly reduce quitting. To analyze the optimal design of training contracts and their welfare consequences, I develop and estimate a structural learning model with heterogeneous beliefs that accounts for many key features of the data. The estimation combines weekly productivity data with weekly subjective productivity forecasts for each worker and reveals a pattern of persistent overconfidence whereby many workers believe they will achieve higher productivity than they actually attain. If workers are overconfident about their productivity at the firm relative to their outside option, they will be less likely to quit and more likely to sign training contracts. Counterfactual analysis shows that workers' estimated overconfidence increases firm profits by over $7,000 per truck, but reduces worker welfare by 1.5%. Banning training contracts decreases profits by $4,600 per truck and decreases retention by 25%, but increases worker welfare by 4%. Despite the positive effect of training contracts on profits, training may not be profitable unless some workers are overconfident. A robust finding in experimental psychology and economics is that people tend to be overconfident about their ability. However, much less is known about whether overconfidence can be reduced or eliminated, particularly in field settings. The second essay of this dissertation provides new evidence using data from the workplace. A field experiment with a large trucking firm shows that workers tend to systematically overpredict their productivity and that their overconfidence is unaffected by whether workers receive financial incentives of different sizes for accurate guessing. Randomly informing workers about other workers' overconfidence reduces overconfidence in the short-run, but the effect fades within two weeks. Neither the incentives or information treatments have any effect on worker satisfaction or search behavior. Using long-term survey data from a second firm, I show that experience reduces overconfidence, but only quite slowly. Although workers at both firms exhibit aspects of Bayesian updating, overconfidence appears to be sticky and difficult to change. The third essay analyzes worker referrals. Many firms use referrals in their recruitment and hiring procedures. Are these practices profitable, and if so, why? A model is developed where referrals may improve selection and reduce moral hazard. The model is tested using extremely detailed personnel and survey data from a leading firm in the trucking industry. Referred workers are similar to non-referred workers across a large number of background characteristics and lab experimentally-measured dimensions of preferences. Referred workers are between 10-25% less likely to quit; the effects are strong across all groups of drivers, including new workers for whom the firm invests in expensive firm-sponsored general training. However, referred workers attain similar initial productivity and productivity growth as non-referred workers, and are no more likely to engage in various forms of moral hazard. The accumulation of friends after the starting work does not positively affect retention, productivity, or moral hazard. On net, the evidence is consistent with the idea that referrals benefit firms by selecting workers with a better fit for the job, as opposed to selecting workers with higher overall quality, by affecting worker behavior, or by changing job amenities.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : László Sándor
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by László Sándor and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation collects three pieces of work. The first chapter documents empirically how Danish households substituted between insurance and liquidity, namely how the up-take of unemployment insurance fell when credit suddenly became more cheaply available for some. The second chapter presents results from a natural field experiment comparing financial and non-financial incentives to promote pro-social behavior. Finally, the third chapter presents the theoretical motivation for and results from a laboratory experiment conducted in Iceland on measuring time preferences conditional on incomes not changing, or correcting for the change when they do.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Luke Comins Donohoe Stein
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Luke Comins Donohoe Stein and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three distinct essays in applied microeconomics. "The Effect of Uncertainty on Investment, Hiring, and R & D: Causal Evidence from Equity Options" (with Elizabeth C. Stone, Analysis Group), conducts an econometric analysis of the impact of economic uncertainty on firm behavior. There is wide debate over this impact, due to the difficulty both of measuring uncertainty and of identifying causality. This chapter takes three steps that attempt to address these challenges. First, we develop an instrumental variables strategy that exploits firms' differential exposure to energy and currency prices and volatility. For example, airlines are negatively affected by high oil prices while oil refiners benefit from them, but both are sensitive to oil price volatility; retailers, in comparison, are not particularly sensitive to either the level or volatility of oil prices. Second, we use the expected volatility of stock prices as implied by equity options to obtain forward-looking measures of uncertainty over firms' business conditions. Finally, we examine how uncertainty affects a range of outcomes: capital investment, hiring, research and development, and advertising. We find that uncertainty depresses capital investment, hiring, and advertising, but encourages R & D spending. This perhaps-surprising result for R & D is consistent with a theoretical literature emphasizing that long investment lags create valuable real put options which offset the effects of call options lost when projects are started. Aggregating across our panel of Compustat firms, we find that rising uncertainty accounts for roughly a third of the fall in capital investment and hiring that occurred in 2008-10. "The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes" (with Jennifer L. Doleac, University of Virginia), considers questions regarding how and under what circumstances buyers respond to a seller's race in the marketplace. Do prospective customers behave differently based on sellers' race or signals about sellers' socioeconomic class? Does this depend on whether a customer lives somewhere racially segregated or plagued by property crime? We investigate these questions in a year-long experiment in which we sold iPods through local online classified advertisements throughout the U.S., each featuring a photograph of the product held by a hand that is dark-skinned ("black"), light-skinned ("white"), or with a wrist tattoo (associated with lower social class). We find that black sellers do worse than white sellers on a variety of metrics: they receive 13% fewer responses, 18% fewer offers, and offers that are 11-12% lower. These effects are similar in magnitude to those associated with a white seller's display of a tattoo. Buyers corresponding with a black seller also behave in ways suggesting they trust the seller less: they are less likely to include their names, and less likely to agree to a proposed delivery by mail (rather than cutting off communication or expressing concern about long-distance payments). Black sellers suffer particularly poor outcomes in thin markets; it appears that discrimination may not "survive" in the presence of significant competition among buyers. Furthermore, black sellers do worst in markets that are racially segregated and have high property crime rates, suggesting that at least part of the explanation is statistical discrimination--that is, buyers' concerns about the time and potential danger involved in the transaction, or that the iPod is stolen goods. "Race, Skin Color, and Economic Outcomes in Early Twentieth-Century America" (with Roy Mill, Stanford University and Ancestry.com), considers the effect of race on economic outcomes using unique data from the first half of the twentieth century, a period in which skin color was explicitly coded in population censuses as "White, " "Black, " or "Mulatto." We construct a panel of siblings by digitizing and matching records across the 1910 and 1940 censuses and identifying all 12,000 African-American families in which enumerators classified some children as light-skinned ("Mulatto") and others as dark-skinned ("Black"). Siblings coded "Mulatto" when they were children (in 1910) earned similar wages as adults (in 1940) relative to their Black siblings. This within-family earnings difference is substantially lower than the Black-Mulatto earnings difference in the general population, suggesting that skin color in itself played only a small role in the racial earnings gap. To explore the role of the more social aspect that might be associated with being Black, we then focus on individuals who "passed for White, " an important social phenomenon at the time. To do so, we identify individuals coded "Mulatto" as children but "White" as adults. Passing for White meant that individuals changed their racial affiliation by changing their social ties, while skin color remained unchanged. We compare passers to their siblings who did not pass. Passing was associated with substantially higher earnings, suggesting that race in its social form could have significant consequences for economic outcomes. We discuss how our findings shed light on the roles of discrimination and identity in driving economic outcomes.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Zachary Aaron Goodman
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Zachary Aaron Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on topics in applied microeconomics. The first essay addresses effective pedagogical tools, and the latter two essays estimate the effects of two distinct tax policies on nutrient consumption. In Chapter 1, we study a novel video-based textbook for intermediate microeconomics. Using a field experiment involving about 400 undergraduates, we estimate the effectiveness of watching videos on exam scores. We find that students experimentally induced to watch more videos perform significantly better on the midterm and final exams. We find no negative spillovers to other courses within the quarter of the experiment, and we find sustained takeup of the videos in the following quarter. In Chapter 2, we study the 1-cent-per-ounce sweetened beverage tax in Cook County, the largest tax (in terms of population affected) of its kind in the United States and the only tax revoked to date. We find that the tax significantly decreases sugar purchases while active and has no lasting effects after the tax is revoked. We find that the tax has the largest sugar-reducing effects for high consumers of regular soda and those who live far from the border of the taxed jurisdiction. We weigh the welfare consequences of the tax by estimating the cost of living increase and find that each gram of sugar reduced cost 3.5 to 6.6 cents. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act payments on nutrient purchases. I find that households with less than two months of income in savings increase total calories purchased in the month following receipt of the stimulus payment. Interestingly, the composition of the increased calories is not representative of the pre-stimulus nutrient bundle. Households greatly increase sugar purchases and do not increase fiber or protein purchases. I do not find evidence of sustained changes in nutrient purchases.
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Moon Moon Haque
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Moon Moon Haque and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation comprises three essays in applied microeconomics. They mostly focused on the evaluation and recommendation of policy issues in the fields of health economics and labor economics, with a direct objective toward to alleviate inequality, and to promote efficient and effective economic policies. The first essay studies how the coverage of health insurance can contribute to obesity (BMI index). First, I extend the the theoretical model of Ehrlich and Becker (1972) to find the relationship between health insurance and obesity; and then supplement the theoretical findings with empirical evidence, using BRFSS data from 2001to 2011 among American young adults. IV regression approach and Lewbel IV (2007) techniques were used to estimate the relationship. The results show that a mere switch from from no health insurance to having insurance is associated with a decrease in BMI of 0.188 kg/m2; which means a weight loss of 1.33 pounds. The second essay explores the possible determinants of out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE) and catastrophic expenditure (CE) in a developing Asian country setting, utilizing a nationally representative random sample of 12,240 households from Bangladesh. Using a Double Hurdle model (Cragg, 1971) approach, I analyze what are the major socioeconomic, demographic and regional factors that are possible determinants of OOPHE and CE. Contrary to common perception that the decesion of whether to spend on healthcare services and how much to spend depend primaily on an individual's health and illness, my analysis shows that illness is but one of the many many factors involved in demand for healthcare. Other influences, such as household characteristics, level of education, types of medical consultants, location, and wealth variable plays a significant role. In addition, expenditure on pharmaceutical drugs is the major component (57%-72%) of healthcare expenditure, and rural households are more likely to suffer CE. Lastly, the third essay studies the empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of reservation policies in Indian labor market. The effectiveness of such prejudicial treatment policies was measured by comparing the relative performance of wage differencials as well as returns to educational attainment accross social caste structure. The study shows that the effectiveness of such policies was positive across all socials groups, although its effect has not been uniform across social structure and in addition, the trend indicates a general decline in benefits of such policies enacted in favor of underprivileged social groups over the survey years. Given the findings, the issue of prejudicial treatment policies still have immense importance from a government policy perspective. .
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Jason Bigenho
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Jason Bigenho and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is composed of three papers on distinct topics, each using a different method from applied microeconomics. In chapter 1, I study how candidates' election results affect the future contribution behavior of their donors using a regression discontinuity design. I find that contributors to narrowly-winning House candidates are much more likely to contribute in the following cycle than contributors to narrow-losers. Much of this effect is driven by future giving to the same candidate, contrary to a "reinforcement learning" hypothesis. This has broader implications, as incumbents can rely more on contributions from past donors than can new challengers. I estimate that candidates from narrowly-winning parties receive $130K more in individual contributions than those from narrowly-losing parties in the following cycle, almost all of this coming from these repeat donors. In chapter 2, we study the role of self- and social-image in social comparisons. We propose and test a theory that casts peer effects as the result of a signal extraction. The theory posits that individuals receive signals of their own attributes through completion of costly actions. Signal extraction is improved through social comparisons with other's actions. In experiments, we find that subjects choose to complete more real-effort tasks in exchange for charitable donations if they anticipate learning how their decisions compare to the choices of others. Further, differentiated responses to noisy or refined social information adhere to the dynamics of signal extraction. In chapter 3, we characterize how municipal governments respond to economic fluctuations, using employment shocks as a proxy. We specifically study the role Tax and Expenditure Limitations play in this response. We find that, following a positive employment shock of one percent, limited municipalities persistently lag behind their unconstrained counterparts in capital-intensive spending, with little differential effect on public safety and administrative expenditures. Our findings illuminate an unintended consequence of fiscal responsibility measures in U.S. cities: limits designed to restrain the size of government may instead alter the government's spending mix, inducing investment cuts that allow a government to maintain patterns of administrative and public safety spending.
Book Synopsis Essays on Applied Microeconomics and Development Income Risk, Income Shocks and Household Financial Decisions by : Fiona Wainwright
Download or read book Essays on Applied Microeconomics and Development Income Risk, Income Shocks and Household Financial Decisions written by Fiona Wainwright and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Essays in Applied Microeconomics by : Chuan Chen (Business economist)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Chuan Chen (Business economist) and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter of this dissertation quantifies to what extent business accelerators can reduce the venture market frictions for early-stage startups. With a novel non-transferable utility two-sided matching framework, this study shows that business accelerators can close the gaps due to entrepreneurs' gender and experience, but not so much for the differences due to locations. The second chapter studies the relative importance of screening compared to training in the total value creation by business accelerators from the perspectives of market participants. The estimates suggest that the value created by screening, which reflects through the improvement of financing in short-term after graduation, represents less than 1/6 of the total value created by business accelerators. Further, such ratios are especially low for top programs like Y Combinator and TechStars. The third chapter investigates the effects of auditor office location on the client and auditor surplus. Using a two-sided matching market model, we find that, while both clients and auditors bear the costs of geographic distance, auditors disproportionately bear costs. Although distance exerts costs on clients, clients incur distance costs to gain auditor expertise.
Book Synopsis Essays In Applied Microeconomics by : Jay Kody Walker
Download or read book Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Jay Kody Walker and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three essays, each of which implements different data specification schemes to econometrically analyze specific topics in the realm of applied microeconomics and microeconometrics. Three separate questions are asked, and economic data is employed to empirically test the validity of alternative answers. These essays are encapsulated in ranging economic fields, but unified in that microeconomic principles and data analysis methods are employed. The initial essay, which is co-authored with Andrew Hussey and Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy, titled "HIV and Recent Trends in Abortion Rates" tests an empirical link between the introduction of HIV/AIDS into the overall population and its possible impact on unwanted pregnancies as realized in lower abortions rates is in the realm of public and health economics. The second essay titled "Greeks Just Want to Have Fun or Do They? Fraternal Membership and College Outcomes" asks whether or not a student's decision to join a Greek organization during their undergraduate college tenure has significant impacts on collegiate outcomes, which delves into the economics of education, peer effects, and public economics. The third essay titled "A Structural Model of the U.S. Orange Juice Market: Alternative Evaluation Methods for Dumping Charges" takes a particular instance where a domestic industry has claimed that foreign producers have dumped products into the United States domestic market and econometrically tests the validity of those claims. This paper's topic is in the realm of international trade, public choice, and public economics.
