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Author : Plamen V. Nikolov
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 342 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (873 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics of Development written by Plamen V. Nikolov and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Luigi Minale
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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (116 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Development written by Luigi Minale and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Francisco Javier Perez Estrada
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (794 download)
Download or read book Essays in Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics written by Francisco Javier Perez Estrada and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : L. Minale
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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (112 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Development written by L. Minale and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Christina Kinghan
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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (111 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Development written by Christina Kinghan and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Fiona Wainwright
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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (856 download)
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:
Author : Changsu Ko
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 147 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (11 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Changsu Ko and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays contribute towards our understanding of applied microeconomics. This dissertation is composed of three chapters. Chapter 1 studies the effect of private tutoring on human capital development. Private tutoring is a widespread service in many countries. However, economic research focusing on the effect of private tutoring on fundamental factors of human capital is scarce. I estimate two human capital production functions in the context of private tutoring, one for cognitive skills and the other for non-cognitive skills. To deal with endogeneity, I adopt the control function approach, based on peer behavior and household budget. The fact that cognitive and non-cognitive skills are not observable is addressed by the latent factor model, which connects unobservable skills with observable measurements. I find that private tutoring does not affect skill accumulation for both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. I also find that peer behavior positively contributes to the use of private tutoring. Chapter 2 explores effect of co-residing grandparents on educational investment for their grandchildren. Multigenerational households are not an unusual type of household in developed and developing countries, but the educational effect of this type of household on children has not been studied extensively in economic literature. This paper explores the effect of coresiding grandparents on educational investment for their grandchildren. First, by using Korean data, I show a significant negative effect on educational investment. In addition, I also find that this negative effect is directed toward female children. To explore the economic reasons behind the effect, I test whether coresiding grandparents participate in the household decision-making process by using statistical tests based on the collective model, and the results show evidence of participation. Hence, the negative effect on educational investment may be related to the preference of grandparents. Chapter 3 studies the effects of generosity from a child care assistance policy on maternal labor supply behavior, such as weekly working hours, and effects on the child care industry. These effects are estimated by exploiting variation in the copayments amount and reimbursement rates for a hypothetical family across multiple states over time. To minimize endogeneity, the fact that the size of funding is largely decided by several state-level variables is incorporated. The results suggest negative effects from higher copayments and positive effects from higher reimbursement rates, although these are less pronounced than those caused by the copayments. Only weak results are observed for the industry-level effects.
Author : Alejandra Catalina Ramos Moreno
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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (112 download)
Download or read book Essays in applied-microeconomics and development written by Alejandra Catalina Ramos Moreno and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: En esta tesis doctoral uso la micro-economía aplicada como herramienta para el rediseño de políticas públicas en países en desarrollo. Con esta herramienta, profundizo en la comprensión del porqué funcionan las políticas y como se pueden utilizar los incentivos económicos para lograr mejores resultados. En el Capítulo 1, Household Decision Making with Violence: Implications for Transfer Programs, estudio cómo la violencia de pareja responde a las transferencias que reciben las mujeres y si esta respuesta depende de la si la transferencia es en efectivo o en especie. Para ello desarrollo un modelo de decisiones del hogar hogar en el cual el hombre puede usar la violencia para resolver desacuerdos con su pareja, pero a costa de destruir parte de la productividad laboral de la mujer. Bajo este marco, las ganancias en utilidad que el hombre se podría apropiar a través de la violencia son mayores cuando las transferencias son en efectivo. Como resultado, las transferencias en especie y las transferencias en efectivo pueden tener diferentes efectos. Este modelo lo estimo usando datos de un ensayo controlado aleatorizado en el cual se realizan transferencias, en especie o en efectivo, a mujeres de familias pobres en Ecuador. Mis resultados indican que si las beneficiarias del programa recibieran una transferencia de efectivo equivalente al 10% del ingreso familiar promedio, la prevalencia de la violencia disminuiría del 17% al 10%. En cambio, si la misma transferencia fuera dada en especie, la violencia disminuiría en 3 puntos porcentuales más. Este efecto diferencial de las transferencias en especie por sobre las transferencias de efectivo se amplifica al aumentar el tamaño de la transferencia. En el capítulo 2, Does Rewarding Pedagogical Excellence Keep Teachers in the Classroom?Evidence from a Voluntary Award Program (conjuntamente con Samuel Berlinski), analizamos los efectos de Asignación a la Excelencia Pedagógica o AEP sobre la retención y la movilidad intra-escolar de los docentes en Chile. AEP es un programa que reconoce la excelencia en la práctica pedagógica, económica y socialmente. Bajo este esquema, los maestros que voluntariamente aplican y aprueban una serie de evaluaciones, reciben un aumento salarial del 6% por hasta 10 años. Para identificar el efecto de recibir esta bonificación, utilizamos una regresión de discontinuidad. Usando datos administrativos sobre varias cohortes del programa, nuestros resultados indican que el bono no altera la decision de los docentes de retirarse del sistema escolar. Para interpretar este hallazgo, construimos un modelo de decision de los docentes a la luz del cual, los maestros que pierden el examen marginalmente valoran su trabajo más que su opción externa. Sin embargo, entre los docentes que reciben la bonificación, observamos un aumento de la movilidad intra-escolar. Algunos de estos hallazgos son consistentes con la certificación cómo señal de la calidad del docente. En el Capítulo 3, Effects of Public Recognition of Teaching Excellence on Peers Voluntary Certification (conjuntamente con Samuel Berlinski), continuamos con el estudio de AEP y analizamos la presencia de efectos pares en la decisión de aplicación. Además del aumento salarial, los maestros certificados son invitados a formar parte de la red Maestro de Maestros, y sus nombres son anunciados en ceremonias con autoridades locales y la cobertura mediática. Para identificar el efecto de la certificación en la tasa de aplicación de los pares usamos una regresión de discontinuidad. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren que, en el periodo siguiente, la tasa de aplicación de los pares de los docentes certificados es el doble de la de los docentes no certificados. Este aumento en la tasa de aplicación al programa se logran sin disminuir la calidad de los aplicantes.
Author : Luke Comins Donohoe Stein
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (847 download)
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.
Author : Edson Roberto Severnini
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (858 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Edson Roberto Severnini and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three studies analyzing causes and consequences of location decisions by economic agents in the U.S. In Chapter 1, I address the longstanding question of the extent to which the geographic clustering of economic activity may be attributable to agglomeration spillovers as opposed to natural advantages. I present evidence on this question using data on the long-run effects of large scale hydroelectric dams built in the U.S. over the 20th century, obtained through a unique comparison between counties with or without dams but with similar hydropower potential. Until mid-century, the availability of cheap local power from hydroelectric dams conveyed an important advantage that attracted industry and population. By the 1950s, however, these advantages were attenuated by improvements in the efficiency of thermal power generation and the advent of high tension transmission lines. Using a novel combination of synthetic control methods and event-study techniques, I show that, on average, dams built before 1950 had substantial short run effects on local population and employment growth, whereas those built after 1950 had no such effects. Moreover, the impact of pre-1950 dams persisted and continued to grow after the advantages of cheap local hydroelectricity were attenuated, suggesting the presence of important agglomeration spillovers. Over a 50 year horizon, I estimate that at least one half of the long run effect of pre-1950 dams is due to spillovers. The estimated short and long run effects are highly robust to alternative procedures for selecting synthetic controls, to controls for confounding factors such as proximity to transportation networks, and to alternative sample restrictions, such as dropping dams built by the Tennessee Valley Authority or removing control counties with environmental regulations. I also find small local agglomeration effects from smaller dam projects, and small spillovers to nearby locations from large dams. Lastly, I find relatively small costs of environmental regulations associated with hydroelectric licensing rules. In Chapter 2, I study the joint choice of spouse and location made by individuals at the start of their adult lives. I assume that potential spouses meet in a marriage market and decide who to marry and where they will live, taking account of varying economic opportunities in different locations and inherent preferences for living near the families of both spouses. I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates a collective model of household allocation, conditional on the choice of spouse and location, with a forward-looking model of the marriage market that allows for the potential inability of spouses to commit to a particular intra-household sharing rule. I address the issue of unobserved heterogeneity in the tastes of husbands and wives using a control-function approach that assumes there is a one-to-one mapping between unobserved preferences of the two spouses and their labor supply choices. Estimation results for young dual-career households in the 2000 Census lead to three main findings. First, I find excess sensitivity of the sharing rule that governs the allocation of resources among couples to the conditions in the location they actually choose, implying that spouses cannot fully commit to a sharing rule. Second, I show that the lack of commitment has a relatively larger effect on the share of family resources received by women. Third, I find that the failure of full commitment can explain nearly all of the gap in the interstate migration rates of single and married people in the U.S. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine unintended consequences of environmental regulations affecting the location of power plants. I present evidence that while hydroelectric licensing rules do conserve the wilderness and the wildlife by restricting the development of hydro projects in some counties, they lead to more greenhouse gas emissions in those same locations. Such environmental regulations aimed to preserve natural ecosystems do not seem to really protect nature. Basically, land conservation regulations give rise to a replacement of hydropower, which is a renewable, non-emitting source of energy, with conventional fossil-fuel power, which is highly pollutant. Restrictions imposed by hydroelectric licensing rules might be used as leverage by electric utilities to get permits to expand thermal power generation. Each megawatt of hydropower potential that is not developed because of those regulations induces the production of the average emissions of carbon dioxide per megawatt of U.S. coal-fired power plants. Environmental regulations focusing only on the preservation of ecosystems appears to stimulate dirty substitutions within electric utilities regarding electricity generation.
Author : Mitchell H. Hoffman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 127 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (94 download)
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.
Author : Suraj Shekhar
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (959 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Suraj Shekhar and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My research interest lies in applying microeconomic tools to issues in Industrial Organization and Development Economics. I like doing research which helps me understand something about the world. For example, in my job market paper (Signalling, Reputation and Spinoffs), I study the following environment. Employees often leave their firm to form a new firm (spinoff) of their own. The literature attributes most of these spinoffs to the worker getting a private new idea. In this paper, I propose a different channel for new firm formation based on signalling and reputation concerns. If high ability workers are mistakenly perceived to be low type then they would like to signal their ability to earn more. Consider a two period principal-worker problem where the worker's type is his private knowledge. If the prior belief about the worker's type is low (high type with low probability) then, despite the principal's ability to offer contracts to persuade the worker to stay, there may exist a separating equilibrium where the high type worker signals his ability by forming his own firm. This result provides theoretical support to the findings of Skogstrom (2012), who observed high rates of entrepreneurship amongst Norwegian workers with low education and high ability. When moral hazard is introduced into the environment, I show that the separating equilibrium may generate the highest incentives to work. This may have policy implications for non-compete clauses.My paper on ethnic conflicts and rumours (Ethnic Conflicts, Rumours and an Informed Agent), with Pathikrit Basu and Souvik Dutta) studies coordination and strategic information disclosure in the context of ethnic conflicts. Rumours often precipitate ethnic conflicts and cause immense damage to life and property. There may exist an agent who knows if the rumour is true or false. We analyze a cheap talk game with multiple audiences (ethnicities) to see how this informed agent (b) may influence the outcome of rumours by sending strategic signals. Since b is biased towards her own ethnicity, she finds it difficult to convince the other ethnicity that she is giving them correct information. We show that even if b is known to be biased towards her own ethnicity, peace is possible in equilibrium. Additionally, we prove that there are only three equilibrium outcomes possible in symmetric strategies. Conflict is inevitable in one. The other outcomes have the following features. One, there may be peace whenever b deems it possible. Two, while b gives more informative signals to her own ethnicity, she may misinform a segment of her own ethnicity in equilibrium. In another paper (What's in a Name? Reputation and Monitoring in the Audit Market), my co-author Somdutta Basu and I explore the difference in the incentives in a collective reputation environment as compared to an individual reputation environment in the context of the US Audit industry. Unlike audit reports in some countries, an auditreport issued in the USA does not include the name of the engagementpartner. In December 2015, a new rule was passed (pending approval from the SEC) which requires that the name of the engagement partner be disclosed in audit reports issued after January 2017. We study the incentives of auditors under the two regimes - withand without disclosure of partner names. We argue that if the levelof monitoring within the audit firm remains the same under the tworegimes, then audit quality will be higher under the disclosure regime.However, an unintended consequence of the new rule is that partners (an engagement quality reviewer or a successor partner)have lower incentives to monitor a fellow partner under the disclosureregime. As a result, under some parametric conditions, audit qualitymay be lower if partner names are disclosed. This problem can be addressedthrough a realignment of incentives inside the accounting firm, externalmonitoring from regulators or through increased audit fees.
Author : Ashley Ruth Miller
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 360 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (72 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Ashley Ruth Miller and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Author : Cong Li
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (138 download)
Download or read book Essays on Applied Microeconomics written by Cong Li and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I empirically investigate the welfare consequences of policy in the context of ability tracking and the development of High-Speed-Railway stations. Chapter 1, based on the hand-collected test score and demographic data collected from a senior high school in China, empirically illustrates how ability tracking influences academic performance and how these effects vary when it's repeated multiple times with teacher discretion versus once. Based on a regression discontinuity analysis, marginal students whose test score is close to the cutoff do not gain or lose from being in a high-achieving class if tracking is based solely on test scores, since peer effects are canceled out by teacher mismatch effects. Teachers tailor the instructional level to the student's abilities. Tracking with teacher discretion benefits students with bad test days by about 0.49 sd. Additionally, teacher discretion does not discriminate based on gender or urban/rural location. In chapter 2, the students' dynamic skill formation function is first defined with three components: innate ability, peer effects, and teacher effects. A Bayesian updating framework is then used to model the process of teachers updating their beliefs about students' abilities. Using the linear measurement equation assumption, students' two-dimensional abilities in science (Math, Physics, Chemistry) and in humanity (Chinese, English, and Biology) are measured by their test scores in each subject. Based on the individual-level panel data, I estimate a parameterized version of the model. The error-in-variables issue can be resolved by selecting multiple measures from the repeated measures. Skills in science is more malleable than in humanity. Teacher effects are more critical in skill formation in earlier periods compared to peer effects. With multiple tracking and teacher discretion, misallocation errors are avoided, all students benefit, especially the high-ability students, and inequality between students increases. In chapter 3, by analyzing registration records of Chinese industrial and commercial firms, I employ a difference-in-differences approach to test the impacts of high-speed railway (HSR) station establishment on industrial structure in peripheral areas from the perspective of new firm entries. I find that firm entries rose in counties with a newly constructed HSR station compared to those without. However, this positive effect mainly comes from city-level counties, and for normal counties whose economic and social development level is relatively low, HSR stations in fact introduce adverse shocks. Moreover, this decrease is due to a fall in the wholesale and retail sectors. On the contrary, the real estate and construction industries have witnessed a rise in new start-ups. This change in industrial structure could result in higher inequality among districts across our country.
Author : Hao Teng
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (115 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Hao Teng and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation develops and applies new techniques to measure the causal effects in observational data. Chapter one investigates the effect of online social networks on consumer behavior. A key challenge is that social network formation is endogenous. Thus, it is hard to distinguish the impact of the social network itself from the impact of the factors leading to the formation of the network. I attack this identification problem using a strategy that exploits social network friendship variation within groups of individuals with similar characteristics. Specifically, I use data from the Yelp Open Dataset to estimate the causal effect of social network friendship on restaurant choices. I apply a machine learning technique to classify individuals into groups based on a high-dimensional vector of characteristics. Using the variation in social network friendship within these groups, I find that compared to non-friends, social network friends are 67 percent more likely to visit the same restaurant within a year. Additional exploration of the heterogeneous effects suggests that this social network effect is stronger for newer users and much weaker for chain restaurants or when a friend's rating is negative (i.e. less than median). The second chapter studies the effect of children's time allocation on their skill development. The work is jointly written with Gregorio Caetano and Josh Kinsler. While there is broad agreement that a significant amount of skill acquisition and development occurs early in life, the precise activities and investments that drive this process are not well understood. In this paper we examine how children's time allocation affects their accumulation of skill. Children's time allocation is endogenous in a model of skill production since it is chosen by parents and children. We apply a recently developed test of exogeneity to search for specifications that yield causal estimates of the impact time inputs have on child skills. We show that the test, which exploits bunching in time inputs induced by a non-negativity time constraint, has power to detect endogeneity stemming from omitted variables, simultaneity, measurement error, and several forms of model misspecification. We find that with a sufficiently rich set of controls, we are unable to reject exogeneity in our most detailed production function specifications. The estimates from these specifications indicate that active time with adult family members, such as parents and grandparents, are the most productive in generating cognitive skill. The last chapter presents my work in the field of education economics and is jointly written with Richard DiSalvo and Josh Kinsler. We use a new approach to estimate the typical effects of school and school district policy changes that directly target suspension reduction, using public national data from the Office of Civil Rights over the period 2000 to 2014. Due to the absence of comprehensive national data on official school policies, we attempt to infer likely policy changes by identifying large, abrupt jumps in reported OSS rates. We study the characteristics of schools and districts that are more likely to have engaged in these "apparent policy changes," finding that, after controlling for baseline out-of-school suspension rates, schools and school districts with a greater share of black students are more likely to engage in abrupt increases in suspension and less likely to engage in abrupt decreases. Then, we use these apparent policy changes as instruments in a difference-in-differences framework, estimating the average impacts of changes in OSS rates when they are achieved through policy changes. We study effects on school test scores, school district graduation rates, and city-level juvenile arrest rates. We estimate that aggregate out-of-school suspension rates have effects on test scores that are comparable to previous literature: roughly, a 10 percentage point decrease in OSS rates translates into a 0.02 to 0.04 standard deviation increase in test scores. Estimated effects on dropout and arrest rates are very imprecise."--Pages viii-x.
Author : Arman Khachiyan
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (133 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Arman Khachiyan and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays studying topics in applied microeconomics. The first chapter is a co-authored paper in which we use daytime satellite imagery and convolutional neural networks to model economic growth at the neighborhood level. In the second chapter, I use this model to examine the spatial distribution of residential impacts from fracking. The third chapter investigates methods of measuring skill distance between occupations and proposes a new method which matches patterns of observed occupational transition. Each chapter uses unconventional data sources and machine learning techniques to contribute to central questions in labor economics research and policy. In the first chapter we apply deep learning to daytime satellite imagery to predict changes in income and population at high spatial resolution in US data. Our model predictions achieve R2 values of and 0.32 to 0.46 in decadal changes, which have no counterpart in the literature and are 3-4 times larger than for commonly used nighttime lights. Our network has wide application for analyzing localized economic shocks. One such application is my second chapter, which studies changes in total neighborhood income and population in areas near fracking extraction and shale reserves. My microspatial approach identifies that fracking exposure as far as 20 miles away leads to a 2 percent decline in neighborhood income. The spatial gradient and associated mechanisms of this effect indicate that it is driven by local industrialization rather than direct environmental externalities. Examination reveals margins of policy and labor conditions which attenuate the observed impacts. In the third chapter I show that a regression framework generates a novel, empirical occupational skill distance norm which is disciplined by observed occupation switching patterns. This approach relieves key limitations of existing measures such as linearity and symmetry. It also allows for an analysis of which skill dimensions relate to the portability of human capital, and which do not. Implications for existing results on skill portability are discussed, along with immediate policy applications on employee adjustment costs.
Author : Nurfatima Jandarova
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (129 download)
Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Nurfatima Jandarova and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
