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Souza, Menezes Aline Maria. "Essays on empirical political economy." Thesis, University of Essex, 2016. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/20066/.
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This thesis studies three channels through which elections and, ultimately, public policy may be interrelated: new media, electoral systems and vote motivation. The media has the fundamental role of providing political information to voters. New media such as the Internet brought about an enormous shift in the availability of political information during elections. Exploiting the timing and geographic variation in the introduction of Internet in Brazil, in the first chapter, I show that municipalities with higher Internet penetration voted more often in candidates who faced legal restrictions for advertising in traditional media. Electoral systems, in turn, have specific features that, in theory, may allow voters to select better politicians by providing more information about candidates and other voters' preferences. In the second chapter, using the discontinuous allocation of single- and dual-ballot electoral rules across mayoral elections in Brazil, I compare the quality of politicians fielded and elected in these systems. In general, dual-ballot candidates from major parties are more politically experienced. This experience may be translated into unobserved political skills that are required to deal with the more competitive electoral process, that, by itself, punishes female candidates, to the extent to which women's participation in politics has been historically low. No differences in performance are observed, except in the attraction of discretionary resources by dual-ballot mayors eligible for reelection, but only in election years. Finally, in the third chapter, I use a quasi-naturally generated group of voters with differential political information and voting motivations to show that politicians extract more rents in municipalities where they know a number of voters is not directly interested in public goods and do not have readily access to local sources of information.
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Ozdemir, Duygu. "Essays on behavioural and organizational economics." Thesis, University of Essex, 2018. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/22114/.
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This thesis consists of three self-contained experimental studies focusing on conformity behavior in the leader appointment process, self-group risk preferences of elected leaders and performance feedback mechanisms. In Chapter 1, I investigate discrimination against women in election settings and whether group dynamics undermine women’s chances to become leaders. I conduct a voting experiment which tests the effect of the candidate’s gender on voting behavior, and the role of conformity. Consistent with the predictions of a simple model, subjects tend to vote for candidates who exhibit similar (risk) preferences. Information on the gender of the candidates mitigates proximity concerns of the voter especially in favor of the male candidate. Yet, there is no conclusive result for the gender bias. The results also confirm that conformity is a significant factor in group decision-making. In Chapter 2, I analyze the mechanism which induces the difference between self and group risk attitudes of elected leaders. I focus on two motivations: a “leadership effect”, that is created by the competition and the sense of responsibility of the leadership status, and a “group concern” of the leader. The results show that elected leaders significantly become more risk-seeking when deciding on behalf of a group compared to their individual decisions. Meeting the expectations of group members seems the main driver of this observed behavioral change. In Chapter 3, in a setting where feedback is given strategically by a supervisor, we theoretically and experimentally analyze how employees interpret the received feedback in forming beliefs of themselves and whether feedback communicates the iv actual performance information truthfully. We found that information transmission occurs only in verifiable feedback mechanisms and private-verifiable is the most informative mechanism. We observed lying-aversion among principles: the results indicate a lying cost, and there is a tendency to send the true information where lying is profitable.
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Demetriades, Marios. "Essays in economics of science, innovation, policy and growth." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2016. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/6712/.
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In this thesis we study the effect of scientific research on economic growth of the EU27 countries for 1981-2010, finding that scientific research determines national growth through patents with a ten-year lag. We also study the effect of funding on scientific research output of researchers and find that national competitive funding and other funding are positively and significantly related to research quality. National competitive funding seems to affect positively research quantity. Internal and EU funding matter only in specific scientific fields. We investigate whether past research productivity determines success in securing competitive funding at the individual level finding a significant and positive association of past cumulative citation-related indicators with the funding decision. We also examine the effect of research output and resources on FP7 applications and success at the country level for the EU28 countries in 2007-2013. We find that for research followers both scientific publications and international collaboration matter for FP7 applications and success and for research leaders, publications matter for FP7 applications and citations matter for FP7 success rates. Finally, we use the principal-agent theory framework to discuss the choices and trade-offs that research policy-makers and researchers face and find that balance in bureaucracy and research orientation within funding schemes can produce optimal results.
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Zilio, Federico. "Essays in the microeconometric evaluation of public policies." Thesis, University of Essex, 2018. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/21324/.
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Chapter 1 examines the health benefits of the Winter Fuel Payment (WFP), an unconditional but labelled cash transfer given to elderly people above the female state pension age with the stated intent of help to deal with heating costs. We exploit the eligibility age cut-off to estimate the causal effect of the WFP on self- reports of chest infection, measured hypertension and biomarkers of infection and inflammation, such as C-reactive protein and fibrinogen. We find a robust reduction in the incidence of high levels of serum fibrinogen and some evidence of reductions in other disease markers that point to health benefits. In Chapter 2, we estimate the incidence of the housing subsidy on subsidised and unsubsidised tenants. Using a reform of the housing subsidies in the UK, we inves- tigate how the exogenous cut in the subsidy affected rents. We find that rents were not significantly reduced by the subsidy cut and the incidence mostly fell on tenants. These findings suggest that the rental market was not originally segmented between subsidised and unsubsidised tenants and the fall in the demand of subsidised tenants was offset by the recent expansion of the private rental market. In Chapter 3, we revisit and offer a reassessment of the literature on the impact of UK National Minimum Wage on employment. We highlight that this literature has em- ployed difference-in-difference designs, which have significant challenges in conducting appropriate inference and very low power when inference is conducted appropriately. In addition, the literature has focused on the binary outcome of statistical rejection of the null hypothesis, without attention to the range of employment effects. In our reanalysis of the data, we find that the data are consistent with both large nega- tive and small positive impacts of the UK National Minimum Wage on employment offering little guidance to policy makers.
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Luo, Yiyang. "Essays in family and labour economics." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19425/.
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This thesis explores family and labour economics issues in the context of different countries, the unified motive is to gain policy implication by applying diversified micro-econometric tools into different datasets. The UK has experienced the 1999 Working Family Tax Credit and the 2003 Working and Child Tax Credit reforms. The first chapter provides the first piece of evidence on the effect of single mothers being eligible to income transfer programmes on early childhood outcomes in the Britain. Using the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), various children’s production functions are used to deal with endogeneity of inputs and unobserved heterogeneity problems. Findings suggest that mothers entitled to in-work benefit has positive effects on both children’s cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes, comparing to the mothers live on welfare. The second chapter presents new evidence on the child quantity- quality (Q-Q) trade-off based on the 1% sample of 1990 Chinese census. The main contribution of this chapter comes from applying a novel Generalised Method of Moments (GMM) approach that accounts for the non-linear distribution of both outcome and endogenous variables. The identification strategy exploits variation in family size that is induced by twin births and first child gender, which allows the test of Q-Q trade-off in a wide range of fertility distribution. I find significantly negative effects of fertility on educational outcome of children, and this trade-off nonlinearly decreases with family size and shows heterogeneous effects by birth order. This chapter provides technique foundation for policies that attempt to reduce contraceptive costs, control population growth and subsidize families with fewer children. The third chapter examines the retirement consumption puzzle using the Chinese Household Income Project data. A failure to smooth the consumption upon retirement would arise considerable concerns for the well-being of elderly people and adjustments of public policies. This chapter employs a regression discontinuity approach and shows that elderly households are able to maintain stable consumption onset of retirement by adjusting expenditure across sub-aggregated categories and household behaviour. This study confirms the prediction of Life Cycle Model and have important implications for using disaggregated consumption data to test the existence of retirement consumption puzzle and for testing consumption theories.
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Sibley, Elissa. "The quality of society : essays on measurement and trust." Thesis, University of Essex, 2015. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/16981/.
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Wang, Senyu. "Essays in bank capital structure." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/40939/.
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This thesis provides an in-depth discussion on banks' capital structure which has drawn very little attention from the literature. It consists of three major empirical essays. The first essay (Chapter III) reviews the major conclusions drawn from the traditional corporate finance literature that has at length examined the capital structures of non-financial firms, while compares their findings with the limited work on the leverage decisions of banking firms. It aims to provide an insight into the factors that actually govern banks' capital choices, cast doubt on whether capital requirements are binding and primarily decide the bank leverage, and introduce the core assumption of this thesis - information asymmetry as an important determinant of capital structure decisions. The second essay (Chapter IV) empirically investigates the effects of information asymmetry on capital structure adjustments of US bank holding companies (BHCs) during 1986 to 2015. By identifying BHCs with bankrupt subsidiaries and arguing that their managers possess better knowledge than market investors concerning the failure of their subsidiaries, this chapter disentangles the real effect of private information on the capital structures of holding banks. The results show that subsidiary failure significantly affects financial policies of the parent companies. Specifically, BHCs increase leverage as early as one year prior to the failure of their subsidiaries, and substantially lower leverage after subsidiary failure. Further tests document that the parent BHCs increase not only debt borrowing but also liquidity assets, and curtail lending in advance to avoid further liquidity and financial constraint problems after their subsidiary failure. Examinations on the dynamic patterns of these BHCs' performance around the subsidiary failure time confirm a smoother performance transition. The third essay (Chapter V) adds to the evidence in Chapter IV and discusses the information asymmetry effect by identifying a different treatment group - BHCs with subsidiaries engaging in M&A activities. The findings lend further support to the core assumption in this thesis. The chapter also finds the indication that financial constraints of BHCs are on average mitigated following their subsidiaries receiving capital infusion following the M&A deals. Overall, this thesis has important implications for the public to understand various incentives that banks may have in making their capital structure decisions.
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Arvidsson, Sara. "Essays on asymmetric information in the automobile insurance market." Doctoral thesis, Örebro universitet, Handelshögskolan vid Örebro universitet, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-12279.
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Tumino, Alberto. "Essays in labour economics : school leaving, unemployment and retirement." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19661/.
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This thesis investigates empirically three topics related, respectively, to school leaving, unemployment and retirement. It consists of three independent research articles, accompanied by a general introduction and a conclusion section. Chapter 1 investigates the extent to which the demand for post-compulsory education of British 16-year-olds responds to local labour market conditions. The findings show that prevailing unemployment rates influence the schooling decisions of students from a less affluent family background, while students from better-off families tend to enrol in post-compulsory education irrespectively of labour market conditions. Factors associated with the family’s socio economic status, such as parental tastes for education and social norms, are arguably at the base of the different behaviours. Chapter 2 analyses the persistence in unemployment incidence during the last two decades. The methodology employed allows disentangling the true state dependence from the confounding role played by observed and unobserved heterogeneity. The evidence supports that unemployment experiences "scar" British workers by compromising their future employability. The findings also suggest a countercyclical pattern of true state dependence as unemployment scars more during recessions. Chapter 3 studies the extent to which retirement influences the cognitive capital of British older workers. The analysis relies on an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity bias. Consistent with the "use it or lose it" hypothesis, the results suggests that retirement contributes significantly to the cognitive decline suffered at older ages by British workers. The final section of the thesis summarises the main findings of the three chapters and discusses policy implications and extensions.
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Herbaux, Denis. "On the economics of interpersonal relationships: three essays on social capital, social norms and social identity." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210211.
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For decades, economic theories have been mostly based on rational choices made by selfish individuals to maximize their utility, while sociology spent a lot of efforts describing the environment of individuals and explaining how this environment shapes theirs decisions. However, the last thirty years have seen many sociological concepts appear in the economic literature. For example, behavioral economics introduces things such as envy or altruism in economic theories. Other notions such as social capital, social norms, trust or community became more and more present in economic papers. The objective of this new strand of literature is to engage into sort of socioeconomic approach and to shed some light on interpersonal relationships. This thesis belongs to this socioeconomic approach, and tries to explore new aspects of various concepts. The two first papers are theoretical. In the first one, we explore the negative side of social capital, which has not been studied extensively, by investigating the effect of a norm on consumers when moving is costly. In the second one, we introduce a sociological concept, namely social identity, in a classic economic model in order to show how social interactions modifies its results, and hence, the importance of taking such interpersonal relationships into account. The third and final paper is an empirical case study of social capital in Belgium, an exercise that has not been done before, with the objective of comparing the level of social capital between the various regions of the country. In the first paper, The Tyranny of Social Norms on Individual Behavior, we study the negative effect of the existence of a norm and moving cost inside a community. Because of deviation cost (such as social shame or peer pressure for example), consumers inside a given community may not reach their ideal consumption, that is the consumption they would have without social constraint. On the other hand, moving to another community may be too expensive (in terms of social assets needed to be part of the new community). Hence, agents may get stuck in their community, being forced to consume something they do not want to. One example of such behavior is the underinvestment in education in some neighborhood. We show that such equilibria are possible and that they may be socially suboptimal equilibria as well as Pareto inferior equilibria. We also show that state intervention can correct those “bad” equilibria by operating transfers between agents in order to lower the moving cost.
In the second paper, Social Identity, Advertising and Market Competition, we use a particular approach of a sociological concept, namely Social Identity, which focuses on the fact that people want to signal who they are to others. We assume that this is done by choosing a specific consumption (think of fashion market for example). We show that under this assumption, the classical result of Bertrand Price Competition does not hold anymore, and that prices and profits are positive, meaning that social identity creates market power for firms. Moreover, if the number of goods is limited, groups will be formed, and there will be multiple equilibria, each one corresponding to a particular partition of the consumers. We then add the possibility for firms to use advertising. This allows consumers to have a coordination tool, but increases also market powers for firms. We investigate the various equilibria that arise and their impact in term of welfare.
In the third paper, Social Capital in Belgium, we construct an index of social capital using the European Social Survey, and we show that this index can be decomposed in three aspects: Trust, Social Activities and Social Network. We then study whether there is a difference in social capital between Belgium’s regions or not. We show that indeed, such difference exists, even when controlling for socioeconomic variables. In a third part, we investigate whether the level of social capital is higher or lower in Belgium than in other European countries, and we analyze European regional differences in term of social capital.
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
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Bessudnov, Alexey. "Essays in occupational social class and status in post-Soviet Russia." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f325c98a-d765-468e-8e5b-74573315d4fe.
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The aim of this thesis is to explore several aspects of occupation-based inequality in post-Soviet Russia that have previously been given little attention in the literature. The data sources for statistical analysis are the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). Various statistical techniques have been used, such as regression models with random and fixed effects, nonparametric and semiparametric regression models, survival models and log-multiplicative models for contingency tables. First, the thesis looks at the validity of the application of the European Socio-Economic Classiffcation (ESeC) in Russia. The results show that ESeC classes in Russia are different in respect to several aspects of their employment contract, such as the probability of informal employment, the index of fringe benefits and unemployment risks. This confirms the validity of the ESeC for Russia. Second, the association between earnings and age is analyzed. The shape of cross-sectional age-earnings profiles in Russia is different from the shape in Western countries, especially for men. There is little variation in earnings across age groups, and younger men have higher average earnings than older men. The thesis suggests and discusses several explanations for this, such as age segregation in the labour market and the effect of class structure. Third, the thesis explores the class gap in mortality. Non-manual classes have lower mortality risks than manual classes, both for men and women. The size of the class gap in mortality in Russia is larger than in Western European countries. Fourth, the thesis constructs an occupational status scale and analyzes its properties. The scale is based on the information about intermarriages between occupational groups. The Russian scale is similar to the scales previously constructed for European countries and the USA. Overall, the thesis demonstrates similarity in the patterns of occupation-based inequality in Russia and in Western industrial countries. It also discusses some technical aspects of class analysis and suggests a more clear separation between the descriptive and causal logic within it.
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Joy, Mark. "Three essays on exchange-rate misalignment." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2601/.
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Theories of exchange-rate determination have generated a vast theoretical and empirical literature. This thesis adds to that body of literature by asking three questions. (i) How do policymakers respond to exchange-rate misalignment? (ii) How does misalignment affect the decisions of financial-market participants? (iii) What do exchange-rate dynamics reveal about the choices of investors in the face of currency risk? These three questions are tackled with studies that offer broad and tractable conclusions and contribute to furthering the current field of research.
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Kadow, Alexander. "Essays in European integration and economic inequalities." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2012. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/3403/.
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The ongoing process of economic integration in Europe and beyond has already led to profound changes that are likely to manifest themselves further. Within Europe, formerly centrally planned economies have joined the European Union (EU) with the intention to ultimately introduce the common currency. On a more global scale, marginalised farmers in developing countries seek to become integrated in the world trading system to lift themselves out of poverty. However, issues surrounding economic inequalities are no longer exclusively confined to emerging economies. Indeed, awareness of income inequalities and their impact on the domestic economy is increasing among industrialised nations. This dissertation seeks to contribute to these topical debates in the form of three self-contained essays. The first essay is concerned with monetary integration in Europe. More specifically, we consider the EU member countries from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) that seek to adopt the euro in the foreseeable future. Our analysis is based on a global VAR (GVAR) model to investigate to what extent central banks in CEE follow the European Central Bank’s lead. We look in another core chapter at the economic implications of the Fair Trade (FT) movement. This is a fairly novel topic to the economics profession and we thus aim to provide intuitive insights. One of the key elements of our trade model is that FT generates and hinges upon economic inequalities. We combine these two aspects in the third core chapter. In particular, we analyse how monetary policy operates in an environment which is characterised by wage inequalities using a New Keynesian model that features heterogeneous labour. The third essay is motivated by the case of the United States, where, similar to many European countries, there is strong empirical evidence for rising internal economic divergence. Overall, the thesis not only combines and investigates topical issues, it moreover does so employing various techniques with the intention to also make contributions on the methodological level. We conclude the monograph by highlighting policy implications and by providing directions for future research.
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Poupakis, Stavros. "Three essays in applied microeconometrics." Thesis, University of Essex, 2018. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/22028/.
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Chapter 1 develops a specification test for a single index binary outcome model in semi-parametric estimation. The semiparametric estimator examined does not rely on any distributional assumption, but it still relies on the single-index assumption. The violation of this assumption creates a source of heteroscedasticity. I extend a set of attractive LM statistics, constructed using auxiliary regressions for the case of logit and probit models, to the semiparametric environment. I derive its asymptotic distribution and show that is has well-behaved finite properties in a Monte Carlo experiment. An empirical example is also provided. Chapter 2 proposes a novel estimation strategy that accounts for asynchronous fieldwork, often found in multi-country surveys. The resulting biases are substantial and this is likely to provide misleading cross-country comparisons. I highlight the importance of accounting for the heterogeneity induced by seasonality in the context of regression modelling in order to obtain unbiased comparisons. This is illustrated with a comparison between a synchronous national survey and an asynchronous cross-national one. Chapter 3, joint work with Thomas Crossley and Peter Levell, proposes a novel estimator useful for data combination. Researchers are often interested in the relationship between two variables, with no available data set containing both. For example, surveys on income and wealth are often missing consumption data. A common strategy is to use proxies for the dependent variable that are common to both surveys to impute the dependent variable into the data set containing the independent variable. We consider the consequences of estimating a regression with an imputed dependent variable, and how those consequences depend on the imputation procedure adopted. We show that an often used procedure is biased, and offer both a correction and refinements that improve precision. We illustrate these with a Monte Carlo study and an empirical application.
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Kang, Young-Kwan. "Essays on monetary and macro-prudential policy in a DSGE model with banking sector." Thesis, University of Kent, 2017. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/63881/.
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The thesis is composed of three chapters which analyze the monetary and macro-prudential policy using a New Keynesian DSGE model with the banking sector. The first chapter evaluates the effectiveness of time-varying macro-prudential tools and their interaction with monetary policy using the model framework of Gertler and Karadi (2011) which emphasizes the role of bank capital and endogenous leverage constraint due to the moral hazard problem. We consider the following three types of countercyclical macro-prudential tools: (i) capital requirements (CAR), (ii) deposit-based reserve requirements (DBRR), and (iii) asset-based reserve requirements (ABRR). The main findings are as follows. First, all three types of macro-prudential policy tools reacting to the financial condition (credit to output gap) are effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and business cycle by weakening the pro-cyclicality of banks' net worth and the counter-cyclicality of the endogenous leverage and external finance premium. Second, the effectiveness of each instrument differs by the source of shocks to the economy. In response to a TFP shock, the counter-cyclical CAR is the most effective to mitigate the fluctuation of credit and output and the ABRR is relatively more effective in response to capital quality shocks (credit supply shock). Third, all types of macro-prudential tools are welfare improving in combination with monetary policy, but the use of macro-prudential policy is relevant in response to the credit supply shock (financial shock). Finally, when the economy is hit by a financial shock, a relatively direct tool like asset-based reserve requirement (ABRR) can be the most welfare-improving and the relationship between monetary and macro-prudential policy can be complementary each other. The second chapter examines the role of banks' endogenous reserves and capital and the usefulness of financial condition (credit aggregates and external finance premium) as an indicator for setting up a relevant monetary policy rule. For the task, I construct an extended version of Goodfriend and McCallum (2007) model which is characterized by banks' loan production function with inputs (collaterals, monitoring works and bank capital buffer) under the households' deposit in advance (DIA) constraint. Main findings are as follows. First, banks' endogenous reserves can mitigate the variation of external finance premium by substituting costly monitoring works for lending. However, the effect of endogenous reserves on output and credits depends on types of shocks (credit-demand vs credit-supply shock), which reflects the role of external finance premium (EFP) as a banking attenuator (pro-cyclical EFP) or financial accelerator (counter-cyclical EFP) respectively. Second, the effect of banks' endogenous reserves can be limited when banks can adjust their capital flexibly compared to when banks' keep their capital to asset ratio (leverage) stable. Third, considering the role of money and the frictions on the credit-supply side, monetary policy reacting actively to the financial condition is welfare improving. These results imply that quantitative easing (QE) policy during the crisis was effective but the effectiveness of QE can be limited when banks can lower their leverage in a pro-cyclical manner. And monetary policy should pay more attention to the financial condition and prevailing interest rates as well as inflation and output gap in the presence of substantive financial frictions on the credit supply side in particular when the banking shocks dominate the economy. In the last chapter (co-authored with Professor Jagjit S. Chadha), we investigate the question facing many emerging economies: the extent to which a workhorse advanced economy model can yield important insights for monetary policy-making. We note that the standard sticky-price, monopolistically competitive model does not allow analysis of money and credit dynamics and led to a concentration of research on simple interest rate reaction functions. However, time-varying financial frictions tend to act as a tax on intermediation activities and so can vary output in a significant manner. In this chapter, we consider the implications of financial frictions for baseline monetary policy using a model calibrated on Indian data and find that a simple interest rate reaction function may not be welfare maximizing when banking shocks are dominant in the economy.
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David, Quentin. "Five essays on human and social capital." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/210298.
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Chapter 1: The Determinants of the Production of Research by US UniversitiesChapter 2: Investment in Vocational and General Human Capital: A Theoretical Approach
Chapter 3: Urban Migrations and the Labor Market
Chapter 4: Local social capital and geographical mobility
Chapter 5: Social Supervision and Electoral Stability on the Geographical Scale in Belgium
Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
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Melissas, Nicolas. "Essays on herding, strategic waiting and cheaptalk." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/211821.
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Gotthard, Real Alexander. "Essays in Behavioral Economics." The Ohio State University, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1429818327.
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Reggio, Ojeda Iliana Gabriela. "Essays in applied econometrics." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1693063571&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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Geraci, Andrea. "Three essays in microeconometric methods and applications." Thesis, University of Essex, 2016. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19599/.
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This thesis comprises three essays. The first two make use of individual-level data on British workers from the British Household Panel Survey to study different aspects of nonstandard employment. The first essay, co-authored with Mark Bryan, presents estimates of the implicit monetary value that workers attach to non-standard work. We employ and compare two alternative methods to measure workers’ willingness to pay for four non-standard working arrangements: flexitime, part-time, night work, and rotating shifts. The first method is based on job-to-job transitions within a job search framework, while the second is based on estimating the determinants of subjective well-being. We find that the results of the two methods differ, and relate them to conceptual differences between utility and subjective wellbeing proposed recently in the happiness literature. The second essay builds on economic theories of consumption and saving choices to investigate whether workers expect temporary work to be a stepping stone towards better jobs, or a source of uncertainty and insecurity. The evidence provided shows that temporary work entails both expected improvements in future earnings, and uncertainty. Households’ consumption and saving choices are used to assess which of these two effects is prevailing, providing an alternative empirical approach to measure the consequences of temporary work for workers’ welfare. The results suggest that a stepping stone effect towards better jobs is present and, more importantly, is perceived by individuals and internalized in their behaviour. Finally, the last essay has a specific focus on econometric methods. A Monte Carlo experiment is used to investigate the extent to with the Poisson RE estimator is likely to produce results similar to ones obtained using the Poisson FE estimator when the random effects assumption is violated. The first order conditions of the two estimators differ by a term that tends to zero when the number of time periods (T), or the variance of the time-constant unobserved heterogeneity (V), tend to infinity. Different data generating processes are employed to understand if this result is likely to apply in common panel data where both characteristics are finite. As expected, the bias of RE estimates decreases with T and V. However, the same does not hold for the estimated coefficient on the time invariant dummy variable embedded in the conditional mean, which remains substantially biased. This raises a note of caution for practitioners.
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Nyarko, Samuel Anokye. "Essays on the Performance, Subsidization and Internationalization of Social Enterprises." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2020. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/304819.
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Social enterprises are hybrid organizations that tackle societal challenges by using conventional business models. Being hybrid organizations means that social enterprises pursue dual objectives: social (developmental) and financial. By taking performance, subsidization and internationalization perspectives, this thesis contributes to understanding the hybridity of social enterprises and how this hybridity drives their general operations and key decisions such as foreign market selection and targeting strategy.Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
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Rialland, P. C. R. P. "Three essays in applied microeconomics." Thesis, University of Essex, 2018. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/23688/.
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This thesis focuses on three vulnerable groups in Europe that have recently been highlighted both in media and in the economics literature; and that are policy priorities. Chapter 1 is a joint work with Giovanni Mastrobuoni which focuses on prisoners and peer effects in prison. Studies that estimate criminal peer effects need to define the reference group. Researchers usually use the amount of time inmates overlap in prison, sometimes in combination with nationality to define such groups. Yet, there is often little discussion about such assumptions, which could potentially have important effects on the estimates of peer effects. We show that the date of rearrest of inmates who spend time together in prison signals with some error co-offending, and can thus be used to measure reference groups. Exploiting recidivism data on inmates released after a mass pardon with a simple econometric model which adjusts the estimates for the misclassification errors, we document homophily in peer group formation with regards to age, nationality, and degrees of deterrence. There is no evidence of homophily with respect to education and employment status. Chapter 2 evaluates a policy in the English county of Essex that aims to reduce domestic abuse through informing high-risk suspects that they will be put under higher surveillance, hence increasing their probability of being caught in case of recidivism, and encouraging their victims to report. Using a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), it underlines that suspects that are targeted by the policy are more 9% more likely to be reported again for domestic abuse. Although increasing reporting is widely seen as essential to identify and protect victims, this paper shows that policies to increase reporting will deter crime only if they give rise to a legal response. Moreover, results highlight that increasing the reporting of events of that do not lead to criminal charges may create escalation and be more detrimental to the victim in the long run. Chapter 3 investigates how migrants in the United Kingdom respond to natural disasters in their home countries. Combining a household panel survey of migrants in the United Kingdom and natural disasters data, this paper first shows, in the UK context, that male migrants are more likely to remit in the wake of natural disasters. Then, it underlines that to fund remittances male migrants also increase labour supply, decrease monthly savings and leisure. By showing how migrants in the UK adjust their economic behaviours in response to an unexpected shocks i.e. natural disasters, this paper demonstrates both how UK migrants may fund remittances and that they have the capacity to adjust their economic behaviours to increase remittances.
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Edet, Samuel Asuquo. "Essays on Innovation Networks and Global Cities." Thesis, IMT Alti Studi Lucca, 2022. http://e-theses.imtlucca.it/348/1/Edet_phdthesis.pdf.
Full textAbstract:
In a competitive economy, technological innovation is a core element of economic growth and development, and its accumulation in a rapidly changing technological environment is key to adaptation. This thesis investigates how cities, particularly global cities can develop new technological capabilities to enter new technological fields and become competitive in new technological areas. First, a new geo-referenced patent database is developed to overcome some limitations of the existing international patent repository to make an international comparison of cities feasible. The new database provides broad coverage of cities in developed and emerging economies and allows us to tackle the following research questions: (i)how the co-patenting network of domestic and international linkages of cities has changed over time? (ii) which cities are more technologically complex? Can we predict the future evolution of cities’ technological complexity? (iii) What is the effect of inter-city linkages and technological relatedness
on the likelihood of cities to enter new technological areas? (iv) which cities are the most central in coordinating complex international teams of inventors on a global scale?
To geo-locate patents, an address retrieval algorithm has been applied to resolve the problem of missing addresses, exploiting the availability of address in patent family and similarity of inventors based on attributes such as working for the same applicant. A harmonized definition for functional urban areas is used to assign patents to cities on a global scale. The database provides a significant improvement from the raw PATSTAT dataset with an estimated confidence level of 84-88%.
We analyze both unweighted (extensive) and patent-weighted (intensive) linkages between cities to address the first research question. The preliminary findings show an increase of international ties both intensively and extensively and the reliance of cities in developing economies on international ties to global cities. To address the second research question, we apply the generalized economic complexity (GENEPY) algorithm to measure the economic
complexity of cities based on patent production in these cities. We use machine learning models (Random Forest, XGBoost, SVM, Neural network) to forecast the future technological complexities of cities. We show that the machine learning models (especially Random Forests) have higher predictive power than the benchmark model (time-independent conditional probabilities) as they account for higher-order and non-linear interdependencies between technologies.
To address the third question, we applied a stratified semiparametric Cox proportional hazard model to examine the
likelihood of cities entering new technologies. We show that inter-city linkages and technological relatedness significantly increase the likelihood of entry into new technological areas.
Inter-city linkages are more critical for non-global cities than for global cities to enter new technological areas, whereas linkages to inventors located in cities with a large pool of inventors positively moderate the effect of inter-city linkages on entry. For the last research question, we use hypergraphs structure and propose a measure based on 3-hyperedges (three cities in multiple countries) in the collaboration networks constructed
from scientific publications and patents to identify the most competitive global cities in the international network of inventors. To this end, we construct a null model using the hypergeometric ensembles of random graphs and find that five US cities play a leading role in transnational networks of researchers. San Francisco stands out as the most global city, but Shanghai is rapidly emerging as a global player.
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Mališauskaitė, Gintarė. "East versus West : did Communist regimes matter in the long-run? : essays on the comparative economics of the former Eastern Bloc countries." Thesis, University of Kent, 2018. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/71525/.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this thesis is to contribute to the strand of research regarding the effects of communist regimes in former Eastern Bloc. We explored the areas that were likely to be affected at the time of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe and to test if there are any signs of the impact extending to long-term. This is especially important due to the data scarcity and heavy censorship during the period of the Soviet Union, which does not allow to reliably estimate the contemporaneous effects of the regime. Therefore, the main research questions are: • Did communist regime education policies create systematic differences in educational attainment levels in comparison to the rest of Europe? Increasing educational attainment level within Eastern Bloc was an important political goal. This is partially due to an aim of developing skilled labour force to man factories and contribute towards advancements in science and technology in the cold war competition with the West, and, in part, due to being means to implant and propagate the regime's ideology. • Is the popular stereotype of excessive alcohol consumption in communist Eastern Bloc reflected in the behaviour of those who lived through the regime even after its collapse? Alcohol was anecdotally known to be a popular companion for recreation in Eastern Bloc, the idea frequently found in Russian cinematography of the day. Any signs of systematically more frequent or larger intake of alcohol after the collapse of the regime would indicate a combination of at least some or all listed reasons: spreading of cultural drinking norms, drinking preferences becoming habitual, and alcohol being as a coping mechanism for experienced trauma. It is likely the list could be extended by more possible explanations. • Is living under one of the communist regimes in Eastern Bloc significantly related to any long-term differences in health outcomes in comparison to the rest of Europe? In addition, is there a difference in perception of own health? This could help address a question if the communist regime had an impact on health and perception of people who experienced and survived it. Measuring differences in perception is particularly interesting since perception latently affects behaviour and choices of economic agents. Each question is addressed in a separate chapter, but the overarching questions are: do educational attainment level, alcohol drinking patterns, health and its perception show signs of the communist regime in Eastern Bloc having a long-term impact? How much, on average, an experience of this regime could contribute to changing and shaping cultural norms, agents' choices, behaviour and perceptions? Answers to these questions would contribute to the knowledge about measuring impacts of historical experiences, could inspire further research, and potentially could be taken into account when modelling and predicting agents' behaviour.
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Pinheiro, De Matos Luis. "Essays on fiscal federalism." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2018. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/119783/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis investigates the effects of pressures brought by increasing capital mobility and interjurisdictional fiscal competition to fiscal policy, focusing particularly on the European Union and the analysis of policy reforms that can be adopted in such contexts. Firstly, the relationship between tax competition and economic growth is re-assessed. In a race to attract mobile capital, jurisdictions compete to offer the highest after-tax rates of return. Governments are driven into the provision of higher levels of productive public goods, and shift their tax structures, towards the taxation of the least mobile factors or least distortive tax bases. In an environment of fixed labour supply, this implies a race to the bottom in capital taxes and a race to the top in the taxes falling on labour. Taking into account the potential effects of fiscal competition on fiscal policy, the consequences of different tax harmonization scenarios are also analyzed. The harmonization of capital taxes leads to a race to the top in taxes on immobile factors. Once tax rates on mobile factors are fixed, tax competition shifts towards immobile factors. This implies that the tax burden falls again disproportionately on labour. Only the harmonization of labour income taxes can avoid this outcome, while leaving room for positive capital income taxes. Secondly, extending this argument within a more detailed model of labour supply calibrated to the EU economy, more detailed policy proposals for a European-wide fiscal harmonization agreement are studied. Labour income and consumption tax harmonization yield potentially better results than capital tax harmonization, as the main fiscal competition-driven government investment distortion, resulting in the over-investment on productive public goods at the expense of merit goods, is minimized. In particular, policy simulation results suggest that indirect taxes, such as value-added taxes, should become a priority instrument for European-wide fiscal reforms. Expenditure side reforms are also necessary, in order to address the race to bottom in the provision of merit goods. Even limited reforms that do not require large increases in the EU budget, such as the introduction of a common European unemployment insurance system, can yield interesting results in a context of interjurisdictional fiscal competition. Thirdly, the cyclical behaviour of fiscal policies across OECD countries is investigated. In i so doing, a more complete picture of fiscal policy can be obtained, by identifying both the short term behaviour of discretionary fiscal policies and long term structural fiscal policy trends. Fiscal policy has become pro-cyclical over recent decades, particularly within the European Monetary Union. The average level of structural fiscal balances and the responsiveness of fiscal policy to the level of debt are found persistently weaker beyond the 70 percent debt-to-GDP threshold, pointing to the relevance of fiscal fatigue episodes. Average fiscal balances and a stronger responsiveness to debt conditions are also found higher at higher levels of the potential level of debt service. This is accompanied by a more pro-cyclical response of the fiscal stance. Finally, the role of fiscal decentralization is also assessed. Two issues remain clear. On the one hand, fiscal decentralization does not appear to directly affect fiscal performance. On the other hand, large intergovernmental transfer systems show a persistent negative relationship with the fiscal stance. Considering the level of sub-national fiscal autonomy also uncovers that this negative effect becomes stronger when sub-national governments have a wide policy scope. These results are found particularly worrying as many OECD countries maintain highly decentralized systems of government, under which large intergovernmental grant systems are kept in parallel with a significant policy scope at the regional and local level.
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Tamanni, Luqyan. "Empirical essays on sustainability, portfolio risk, and outreach of Islamic microfinance institutions." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2017. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/8489/.
Full textAbstract:
Islamic microfinance is a growing sector that is expected to provide a long-term solution to poverty in the Muslim world, home to more than 600 million poor people. The role of microfinance institutions in poverty alleviation is still debatable, however established literature provides assurance that microfinance does contribute to the development of financial sector and reduction of poverty in developing countries. Nonetheless, the rise of competition in the microfinance sector has forced many microfinance institutions to resort to commercial funding and lending activities, which according to some studies has led microfinance institutions to trade off poverty alleviation objective with commercial goals of profitability and sustainability. This thesis examines the impact of commercialisation push and its subsequent impacts on Islamic microfinance institutions in three empirical chapters. They are a) comparison of financial performance i.e. profitability and sustainability, between Islamic microfinance institutions with conventional microfinance institutions, b) examination of portfolio risk and vulnerability of Islamic microfinance institutions (IMFIs), and finally c) survey of the presence or absence of ‘mission drift’ at IMFIs. The thesis benefits from the latest panel data provided by MIX Market database, which is obtained from the publicly accessible websites at www.mixmarket.org. MIX Market provides reliable dataset for many microfinance institutions from all regions in the world. However, the dataset used for this research covers 1,320 microfinance institutions during the period of 1998 to 2014, from four regions where IMFIs exist, namely East Asia and Pacific, South Asia, Middle East and North Africa and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. IMFIs represent about 2.88 per cent, or only 38 IMFIs, in the dataset from the overall sample. Using Ordinary Least Squares regression to analyse financial performance, portfolio risk, and poverty outreach, the research finds mixed results. Overall, although IMFIs are worse off than their conventional counterparts in terms of financial performance, i.e. lower profitability and high cost, they are relatively better off with outreach to the poor, indicated by lower average loan balance per borrower to income per capita (depth of outreach) and positive number of active borrowers (breadth of outreach). In addition to lower or negative profitability, the first empirical chapter also indicates that IMFIs are operating at higher cost per borrower than conventional MFIs. However, interestingly IMFIs manage to record positive operational self-sufficiency (being a ratio of financial revenue over expenses, or OSS), which is an important indicator of sustainability, in addition to return on assets (ROA). Lower ROA is attributed to higher operational cost, e.g. cost per borrower, while OSS is higher mainly due to irregular funding mechanism of IMFIs. Many of the IMFIs rely on donations or charitable funds and also to a certain extend grants from government and donors. The second empirical chapter explores portfolio and default risk of IMFIs and find that they are facing relatively lower risks than conventional MFIs. The result defies expectation, as IMFIs are face challenging working environment and operate in some of the poorest countries in the world with frequent natural disasters or armed conflicts. They are also less vulnerable despite their clients are from the poorest segment in the society, often with lower educational level, and the nature of Islamic financial products are relatively unknown to most clients. Many of the IMFIs and their clients live in countries considered to be high risk or have histories of instability, either politically or economically. Finally, the third paper examines poverty outreach performance of MFIs to find any evidence of mission drift in Islamic microfinance institutions. Using similar method with the first empirical chapter, the paper finds that there is no clear evidence of mission drift at Islamic microfinance institutions, as indicated by lower Average loan balance per borrower to income/capita and at the same time significantly lower percentage of women borrowers. However, this claim requires more explanations to qualify as convincing evidence. The findings contradict the argument for mission drift, i.e. the presence of higher Average loan balance and lower Percentage of women borrowers. The results do not confirm nor reject the hypothesis that there will be no mission drift at Islamic microfinance institutions. Nonetheless, the results are consistent with literature i.e. there is no clear evidence of mission drift in existing and mostly conventional microfinance institutions. Overall, the regression results of all three empirical chapters of the thesis indicate that IMFIs are still loyal to their primary mission of poverty alleviation, despite operating at a loss and high operational cost. Their relatively positive outreach, in both scale and depth, is complementary to consistently high operational self-sufficiency. Although sustainability is important in microfinance, IMFIs are not currently concerned with sustainability objectives as their funding mechanism can still support their pursuit of poverty alleviation. However, as the drive of commercialisation and intensifying competition continue, especially with many international donors becoming more selective, IMFIs must abandon over-reliance on subsidy or grants. Should their current financial performance persists, i.e. lower return and higher cost, IMFIs may soon discover poverty alleviation mission as liability, not an achievable goal.
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Ezer, Mehmet Onur. "Essays in Macroeconomic and Macroprudential Policies." Thesis, Boston College, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:108089.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis advisor: Peter IrelandThesis advisor: Christopher Baum
In this dissertation, I focus on macroeconomic and macroprudential policies. In Chapter 1, I study the effectiveness of macroprudential policy tools on bank risk. The findings show that although macroprudential policy tools can stabilize the financial system, under certain conditions, they might have perverse effects. In Chapter 2, I examine monetary aggregates, and show that once measured correctly, they can be useful in gauging the stance of monetary policy. In Chapter 3, by studying the deter- minants of sovereign debt crises, I aim at improving our understanding of sovereign debt distress, and also strengthening the toolkit for crisis prevention. Chapter 1: Following the 2007-2009 financial crisis, there has been an increase in the use of macroprudential policy tools – such as loan-to-value ratio caps and interbank exposure limits – to achieve financial stability. Existing research on the effectiveness of macroprudential policy has focused on country-level variables such as total credit growth and house price inflation. In “The Effectiveness of Macropruden- tial Policy on Bank Risk,” I study how the effectiveness of macroprudential policy varies across banks and policy tools. Using system GMM on bank-level data from 30 European countries for the time period between 2000 and 2014, I document that stricter regulation in the form of exposure limitations tends to decrease banks’ risk levels whereas capital-based tools tend to induce higher risk-taking. After a policy tightening, loan loss provisions and non-performing loans ratios of banks suffering losses can increase substantially, up to five percentage points, while they are likely to decrease for profitable banks. Constraining activities by stricter regulation can lead to a search for yield. Therefore, policy designers should pay particular attention to the increase in risk-taking following policy tightening, especially by banks suffering losses. Chapter 2: It is crucial for policymakers to successfully gauge the stance of mon- etary policy and understand the mechanisms through which it affects the economy. Conventional models focus on interest rates alone, and omit monetary aggregates from policy discussions. In “Do Monetary Aggregates Belong in a Monetary Model? Evidence from the UK,” I examine whether augmenting the measure of monetary policy with monetary aggregates helps in drawing more robust links between policy and economic fluctuations. After constructing the Divisia money index for the United Kingdom, I employ structural vector autoregression to identify two different episodes of UK monetary policy regimes. Inclusion of this (correct) measure of the quantity of money and disentangling money supply from money demand remedy the price and liquidity puzzles which frequently appear in the vector autoregression literature. The results point to the informational content embedded in monetary aggregates, and suggest that monetary aggregates should be taken into account while evaluating monetary policy. Chapter 3: In assessing debt sustainability for advanced and emerging markets, the IMF’s Market Access Countries’ Debt Sustainability Analysis (MAC DSA) com- pares the levels of debt and gross financing needs (GFNs) against benchmarks sepa- rately derived from the noise-to-signal approach. In “Determinants of Sovereign Debt Crises,” I identify the main factors that contribute to sovereign debt crises. I take into account a broad range of debt distress drivers, including debt levels and gross fi- nancing needs, but also debt composition, macroeconomic fundamentals, and country characteristics such as whether the country is a small state or member of a currency union. By using the estimation results, I first derive an indicative cutoff probability of debt distress level. Then, I calculate the corresponding thresholds for debt variables, above which countries are predicted to experience an episode of debt distress
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics
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Sanchis-Guarner, Rosa. "Essays on urban and spatial economics." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2012. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/455/.
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This thesis is composed of four chapters. The first one investigates the impact of immigration on housing markets. The rest study the effects of transport policy on economic outcomes. Chapter 1 provides causal estimates of the effects of an increase of foreign-born population on house prices. I use data for the Spanish provinces between 2001 and 2010. In order to infer causality I construct an instrument based on past location patterns by immigrant nationality. I find positive effects of the increase in the share of foreign-born population on both rental and purchase prices. The estimated elasticities are 0.6% for rental prices and 2% for purchase prices. I also investigate the relationship between immigration and native location (native displacement) and I find that immigrants attract natives to the same regions they locate. When I re-estimate the effects using solely the variation on population growth which is due to exogenous location of foreign-born, I find that estimates are around 30-40% smaller than if we ignored the relationship between immigration and native location decisions. Chapters 2 to 4 investigate the effects of road improvements on aggregate and individual economic outcomes, using data for Great Britain during the period 1998-2008. Chapter 2 develops the methodology to estimate the economic impacts of transport improvements. We summarise the existing evidence and the theoretical channels through which transport policy can impact firm, worker and aggregate economic outcomes. To capture the effect of road improvements, we construct a measure of accessibility to employment through the road network. For this purpose, we collect novel data on 31 major road improvement projects and combine this information with the trunk road network in Great Britain in 2008. This information is used to calculate optimal travel times between locations at each point in time, which are used in the computation of the accessibility measures. The last two chapters discuss the empirical results, for ward and firm outcomes (chapter 3) and for individual labour market outcomes (chapter 4). I find positive effects of accessibility on ward employment and number of plants, a limited effect on plant employment and no effect on productivity. Accessibility from workplace has substantial impacts on individual wages and total hours worked, while accessibility from home only seems to have an effect on reducing the travel time to work.
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Genard, Jean Louis. "Essai de réexamen de la sociologie de la morale." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/213178.
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Anderson, Chingun. "Essays on institutions, ethnic divisions and poverty." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19954/.
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What is the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and the ability of the poor to organize and influence democratic governments to improve their welfare? Political scientists and economists have argued that democracies are superior to non-democracies for improving poverty outcomes because they are advantaged with institutional mechanisms such as universal suffrage and majority rule. Yet, there are numerous cases where democracy has done little to help the poor. Through a series of essays, I examine the effects of ethnic heterogeneity of the poor on the effect of democracy and oil revenue on poverty. I argue that ethnic heterogeneity reduces the likelihood that poor citizens will organize and pressure political elites to provide public goods and services that improve their general welfare. As a result, democracy and oil revenue are less likely to improve poverty outcomes when the poor are ethnically heterogeneous compared to being homogeneous. The first chapter presents a cross-national study to help us understand the general effects of ethnic heterogeneity of the poor on the effects of democracy on poverty. The results are not statistically significant. It is not clear if the lack of significance is due to notable endogeneity issues or that the hypothesis is wrong. For that reason, the second chapter takes advantage of an institutional natural experiment in Indonesia to produce more reliable results. The results show that ethnic heterogeneity of the poor significantly affects the effect of elections on the majority of the dependent variables. In the third chapter, I test the effects of ethnic heterogeneity of the poor on the effect of oil revenue among Brazilian municipalities. The revenues local democratic governments depend upon increased significantly due to the sharp increase of offshore oil royalties and world oil prices from early 1990s to the early 2010s. This allows me to measure the effects of ethnic heterogeneity of the poor on the effect of oil revenue on poverty at the municipal level. Results suggest that ethnic heterogeneity of the poor does not significantly affect the effect of local oil revenue on poverty outcomes in Brazil.
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Wong, Kai Tim (Douglas). "Essays on international stock markets and real exchange rate dynamics." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2019. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/41051/.
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This thesis aims to examine the long-run determinants of the real exchange rate, and to identify the sources of real exchange rate and relative stock price short-run fluctuations. In chapter 1, I incorporate the relative stock prices into the Dornbusch's Mundell-Fleming Real Exchange Rate Model in order to investigate the long-run relationship between the money, goods and stock markets. In chapter 2, I build on the work of Dornbusch (1976), Clarida and Gali (1994), Malliaropulos (1998) and Hoffmann and MacDonald (2000) in order to form the sticky-price equilibrium solution for identifying the source of real exchange rate fluctuation. In chapter 3, I empirically investigate whether the financial crises, the US monetary policy and the exchange rate regime switching of a country affect the real exchange rate co-moment. In addition to the cross-country real exchange rates correlation, the evolution of the equilibrium real exchange rates equicorrelation and temporary real exchange rates equicorrelation are also examined. In chapter 4, I present a model which builds on the stochastic rational expectations open macro model presented by Obstfeld (1985) and Clarida and Gali (1994) and incorporates Malliaropulos's (1998) theoretical relationship between the real exchange rate and the relative stock differential. The model provides both the short- and long-run flexible price solution for identifying the source of relative stock prices. In chapter 5, I attempt to investigate whether the exchange rate can predict future changes in the stock market return and in the economic performance of a country. I present a model that can be used for analysing whether the real exchange rate or the real exchange rate misalignment would contain an economically significant predictable component on forecasting the future stock price movement and the real output.
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She, Powen. "Essays on career mobility in the UK labour market." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19955/.
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This thesis consists of three substantial chapters on topics related to occupational and industrial mobility. Using quarterly data of the Labour Force Survey (LFS) from 1992 to 2013, Chapter 2 documents the mobility across occupations and industries (referred to as career change). The findings suggest that occupational and industrial mobility are surprisingly high. Both occupational and industrial mobility are procyclical. The majority of instances of career change are associated with wage growth. During an expansion, a career changer's wage grows more than someone who stays in their career. However, this does not apply if the career changer was unemployed and then hired during a recession. The evidence suggests that career mobility during a business cycle is important for understanding the labour market flows and wage growth. The use of interviewing method may affect the accuracy of the data. The dependent interviewing is introduced in the survey, and is helpful in reducing the measurement errors. Chapter 3 uses data from British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and UK Household Longitudinal Survey (UKHLS) to examine the robustness of the results obtained by using LFS. The procyclicality of occupational and industrial mobility are reassured when the change of interviewing method is controlled for. The further detailed occupational and industrial classification is applied, and the pro-cyclicality of occupational and industrial mobility is found in the further detailing of classifications. Given the solid evidence found in Chaper 2 and 3, Chapter 4 develops a theoretical model to understand the mechanism of workers' reallocation. Aggregate productivity shock, sectoral productivity shock and preference shock are included in order to investigate reallocation through business cycle, net mobility and gross mobility respectively. This model shows the procyclicality of gross mobility between sectors, which is consistent with the findings in Chapter 2 and 3. This chapter also explains the higher level of unemployment during recession. This thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the occupational and industrial mobility in the UK using both empirical and theoretical methods. Limitations of this thesis and suggestions for future research are provided.
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Liu, Yanxu. "Three Essays on the Economics of Controlling Invasive Species." DigitalCommons@USU, 2014. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/2190.
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This dissertation addresses issues pertinent to the control of an invasive species, issues that pertain both to a species’ introduction at a country’s international border and its spread within the country’s border. In the first essay, tariffs and inspections are examined as a joint border control mechanism. In a deterministic setting, where the invasive species level is functionally related to a foreign (i.e., exporting) country’s shipment size, a traditional tariff can be optimal for the home (i.e., importing) country in the short run, but distorts the entry condition for foreign firms and results in a suboptimal industry size in the foreign country in the long run. When the foreign country’s abatement effort determines the invasive species level, an additional home-country tariff on the invasive-species level (which I call an “invasive-species tariff”) is necessary to motivate the foreign firms to abate the invasive species at socially optimal level. In the second essay I consider the case where the invasive species contamination level is jointly determined by the foreign countries’ abating efforts and random environmental factors. The home country may use standard contracts to mitigate imperfect observability caused by the random factors. However, I show that the home country must provide risk-averse foreign countries with higher subsidy rates than the first-best rates with perfect information as compensation for partially bearing the risk. When risk-averse foreign countries face both individualistic and common random environmental factors, a standard tournament scheme is capable of attaining the home country’s first-best invasive-species solution. The third essay addresses the control of an established invasive species outbreak in the home country with multiple spatially-connected individuals. The optimal response to invasion (eradicating, stopping, or ignoring invasion) is determined by the incremental damage of invasion and the marginal control cost. Different spatial scales lead to a divergence between the control incentives of society and individuals, and result in a deficiency of individualistic control, which in turn results in a larger steady-state invasion area. Numerical analysis also demonstrates that the number, size, and spatial configuration of small and large individual land parcels influence the severity of the externality and the insufficiency of privately supplied control. I introduce a dynamic multiple-source-subsidy scheme to internalize the externalities, which prompts individuals to coordinate and follow the social optimal control path without a budget burden on the government.
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Huang, Jilei. "Essays on estimating and calibrating the effects of macroeconomic policy over the business cycle." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2495/.
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This thesis consists of three chapters on post-reform Chinese business cycles and alternative methods for solving non-linear rational expectations models. Using quarterly data for the period 1980-2009, Chapter 1 examines the effects of aggregate demand and supply shocks on aggregate fluctuations in China. It further decomposes demand shocks into money supply, money demand and fiscal shocks as in the IS-LM-PC model by applying both long- and short-run restrictions in the context of the structural VAR proposed by Galí (1992). The results show that the estimated impulse responses, in terms of the supply and the three demand shocks, match well with the predictions of the theory. However, as the forecast error variance decompositions show, supply shocks are the main source of fluctuations, accounting for about 89% of output variations in the short-run. Given the nature of this transition economy, this may indicate that there are still institutional obstacles due to incomplete economic reform which prevents the market mechanism from working fully. Despite the overall dominance of supply shocks, the historical decomposition of the five cycles in output between 1983 and 2009 detects important roles played by various demand shocks in some sub-periods. The above results are robust to alternative choices of data for money and interest rate. In Chapter 2, an RBC model with utility generating government consumption and productive public capital is calibrated to annual Chinese data for the post-reform period 1978-2006. The main findings are: (i) the model generates a reasonable overall account of the business cycles in the Chinese economy; (ii) TFP shocks mainly contribute to the good fit of the model, whilst the two fiscal policy shocks help to further improve the model's performance; (iii) our results are robust to alternative calibrations such as high and low capital shares, weights of components in utility and constant return to scale aggregate production function in public capital; and (iv) the shock to the ratio of government consumption to output delivers a dominant negative wealth effect, whilst the shock to the ratio of government investment to output can generate significant positive wealth effects in both the short- and long-run. The third chapter solves the benchmark New Keynesian model using the log-linearization method, second order approximation and the parameterized expectations algorithm (PEA). The results show that the three solution methods display varying degrees of quantitative differences in simulated population moments, distributions, policy functions and impulse response functions. In particular, the generated price dispersions are significantly different across solution methods. The accuracy evaluations in terms of Judd's criteria and Marcet's statistical test show that the PEA performs better than the other two methods, particularly when solving the price-adjustment equation. This result is robust to a number of alternative calibrations.
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Goss, Line Valerie. "Two Essays in Financial Economics." ScholarWorks@UNO, 2014. http://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/1920.
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Chapter 1 of this study investigates the link between a firm’s capital structure and their industry competitive behavior. Given the competitive behavior in certain markets, Cournot or Bertrand, we investigate if there are any inborn characteristics of these markets’ competitive behavior that would create an incentive for Cournot firms to have a different strategic debt level than Bertrand firms. Related theories argue that any industry’s competitive behavior, whether it is Bertrand or Cournot would typically consist of a certain type of debt and pursue a certain type of competitive strategy, based on its classification. In this study, we investigate the debt level of a sample of firms classified into either Cournot or Bertrand competition, i.e. explore competitive behavior as a characteristic of firms that tend to be associated with different debt ratios and determine if the competitive market type does in fact lead to a varying debt ratio target. We used two different measures to categorize competition type, the CSM and the SI measure. Our findings indicate that there is no significant difference between differentiated debt levels between Bertrand and Cournot firms.
Chapter 2 of the study examines various factors that may affect American Depository Receipts’ trading volume distribution between their home and US markets. These include factors not previously considered in the extant literature. One such factor is the trading motive (hedging or speculative) of investors. Other factors examined include price impact, relative volatility, market to book ratio, as well as a cultural dimension factor: individualism. Controlling for time-specific effects, we find that the relative motive measure of cross-listed firms has a positive relationship on the trading volume distribution. In addition, when looking at a small sample of firms with different motive factors, we find that hedging motive in the home country leads to an increased proportion of trading in the host country relative to the home country, while speculative motive leads to a decrease in the volume share of the host country relative to the home country. A positive and significant relationship is also observed between volatility and the log of trading volume share. The relationship is negative for liquidity and visibility in relation to the trading volume distribution of cross-listed firm’s stocks. Culture difference at home relative to host is found to positively impact trading volume distribution of cross-listed stocks.
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Pourroy, Marc. "Essays in monetary politic in emerging economies." Phd thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - Paris I, 2013. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00984303.
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This PhD dissertation is made of four papers on central banking in inflation-targeting emerging economies. The first part of the dissertation is dedicated to two empirical works, based on the experiences of the 19 emerging economies that have adopted an inflation-targeting framework. I examine what exchange rate arrangement these economies are implementing together with the inflation targeting strategy, and what can explain their choice. ln the first chapter, I propose a new method to build up taxonomies of exchange-rate regimes. My approach is based on Gaussian mixture estimates. ln the second chapter, the choices for exchange-rate arrangements are explained though panel econometrics analysis. The second part of the dissertation is about the theory of optimal monetary policy. ln the first chapter, I propose an original dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to study what should monetary policy do when food price hikes, in a small open emerging economy. ln the last chapter, a similar modeling approach is used to analysis how credit constraints impact monetary policy in financially venerable emerging economies.
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Dieye, Rokhaya. "Three essays on social interactions and education : theory and application." Doctoral thesis, Université Laval, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11794/26041.
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L’objectif principal de cette thèse est de proposer des méthodes d’identification des effets qui découlent des interactions sociales dans le contexte éducatif. La pertinence de ma recherche se trouve à trois niveaux : 1) elle nous aide à mieux mesurer l’impact du réseau social sur les comportements individuels ; 2) elle améliore notre compréhension de phénomènes sociaux négatifs tels que l’obésité ou le décrochage scolaire ; 3) elle permet de proposer des politiques publiques adaptées, qui permettent d’exploiter au mieux les effets qui découlent de ces interactions sociales en milieu scolaire. L’atteinte de nos objectifs se fait à travers trois chapitres. Le premier chapitre propose une nouvelle stratégie d’estimation de l’influence du réseau social sur les décisions individuelles dans un contexte d’interactions en réseau à l’aide d’expériences randomisées. Le chapitre combine le modèle structurel d’interactions sociale développé par Bramoullé et al. [2009] avec une expérience randomisée. Des conditions d’identification sont fournies et le modèle est estimé et validé sur des données expérimentales recueillies pour l’évaluation d’un programme de bourses d’études en Colombie. De par sa conception, la randomisation est au niveau de l’élève. Les données sur réseaux d’amitié révèlent que les étudiants traités et non traités interagissent ensemble. En plus de fournir des preuves sur la présence d’effets de pairs dans la fréquentation scolaire, le chapitre conclut que la non prise en considération des interactions sociales de pairs conduit à une surestimation de l’impact réel du programme. L’objectif du deuxième chapitre est de proposer un modèle qui tient compte de l’hétérogénéité des effets de pairs entre les différentes catégories d’individus dans un cadre d’interactions en réseau. Les catégories peuvent se composer du genre ou de la race de l’individu, entre autres. Des conditions d’identification d’un modèle qui généralise celui proposé par Bramoullé et al. [2009] sont dérivées, et l’hétérogénéité des effets de pairs est permise à l’intérieur et entre les catégories. À l’aide des données Add Health, le chapitre explore l’hétérogénéité sur le poids des adolescents mesuré par leur indice de masse corporelle, utilisant à la fois le genre et une catégorisation basée sur leur groupe racial. Les résultats montrent que l’effet positif endogène trouvé en utilisant le modèle homogène présente de l’hétérogénéité lorsque l’on considère ces deux catégorisations. Alors que les deux premiers chapitres de cette thèse étudient les réseaux d’amitié dans une tentative d’identifier les effets qui résultent des interactions sociales, le troisième chapitre considère le réseau de partage de cours -course-overlap- fourni par les études Add Health et AHAA. Le modèle est agrégé au niveau local et a la particularité, contrairement à d’autres études sur les effets de pairs, que la matrice d’interactions sociales considère les marges extensive et intensive. De plus, les interactions de ce type sont meilleures dans la conception des politiques scolaires. L’estimation du modèle sur les résultats scolaires généraux, en mathématiques et en sciences révèle la présence d’effets d’interaction sociales positives et significatives en utilisant les techniques des moindres carrés à deux étapes et la méthode des moments généralisés.The aim of this thesis is to investigate identification of peer effects and their application on a large set of outcomes, going from school attendance to obesity. The relevance of this research relies on three main points: 1) it allows better measurrement of effects stemming from social interactions, thus providing some answer to the numerous econometric issues that make the study of peer effects a lot challenging; 2) it improves our comprehension of negative social phenomena, including the incidence of school dropouts and obesity; 3) it proposes better public policies aiming at fighting against such phenomena by exploiting social network effects that contribute to amplify them. The different objectives of this thesis are investigated in three different chapters. The first chapter proposes a new strategy for estimating the influence of the social network on individual decisions in a network context using randomized experiments. It combinates the structural social network model developed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] and randomized experiments. New identification conditions that mostly require balance in the characteristics of friends between treatment and control groups are provided. The model is estimated and validated on experimental data collected for the evaluation of a scholarship program in Colombia. By design, randomization is at the student-level. Friendship data reveals that treated and untreated students interact together. Besides providing evidence of peer effects in schooling, the chapter concludes that ignoring peer effects would have led to an overestimation of the program actual impact. The aim of the second chapter is to propose a model that accounts for heterogeneity in peer effects between individual categories in a network setting. Identification conditions of a network-based interactions model that generalizes the one proposed by Bramoullé et al. [2009] are derived, and heterogeneity of peer effects is allowed within and between categories of individuals. Using the Add-Health dataset, the study explores heterogeneity in adolescents weight using both gender and racial categorizations. The results show that the positive endogenous effect found using the homogeneous model is actually heterogeneous when considering both gender and racial categorizations, as for example, females seem to be more influenced by their female friends than by their male friends. While the first two chapters consider friendship networks in an attempt to identify the effects that result from social interactions, the third chapter considers the course-overlaps network. The model is local agregate and has the feature, unlike other studies of peer effects, that the interaction matrix accounts for the extensive and intensive margins. Interactions of this type are better to design school policies. The chapter then proceeds to estimation of peer effects in overall GPA and GPAs in both mathematics and science courses using the Add Heakth and AHAA datasets. The results reveal the presence of positive and significant social interaction effects using both 2SLS and GMM estimation techniques.
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Pruschak, Gernot Verfasser], Christian [Akademischer Betreuer] [Hopp, and Frank T. [Akademischer Betreuer] Piller. "Ethical and responsible behavior in applied empirical research: four essays on academic practices in the social sciences / Gernot Pruschak ; Christian Hopp, Frank Thomas Piller." Aachen : Universitätsbibliothek der RWTH Aachen, 2021. http://d-nb.info/1231911751/34.
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Adams, Abigail. "The nonparametric approach to demand analysis : essays in revealed preference theory." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2013. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d2a548aa-e720-4975-802b-e55d08dec9e6.
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This thesis comprises three principal essays, each of which provides a contribution to the literature on the nonparametric approach to demand analysis. In each essay, I develop novel techniques that follow in the revealed preference tradition, and apply them to tackle a series of questions that concern the mechanisms underlying consumer spending decisions. Each technique developed is tightly linked to a particular nonparametric theory of choice behaviour and is explicitly designed for use with a finite set of observations. My work draws heavily upon results from finite mathematics, into which I integrate insights from information theory and integer programming. The output of this endeavor is a set of methodologies that are largely free of auxiliary assumptions over the form of the unobserved structural functions of interest. Providing greater detail on the work to come, my first essay extends and clarifies the nonparametric approach to forecasting demand behaviour at new budget regimes. Using insights from information theory and integer programming, I construct an operational nonparametric definition of global rationality and develop a methodology that facilitates the recovery of globally rational individual demand predictions. This is the first attempt in the literature to develop a systematic methodology to impose global rationality on nonparametric demand predictions. The resulting forecasts allow for unrestricted preference heterogeneity in the population and I demonstrate how these predictions can be used for coherent welfare analysis. In my second and third essays, I prove new revealed preference testability axioms for models that extend the traditional neoclassical choice framework. Specifically, in my second essay, I address the intertemporal allocation of spending by collectives, whilst my final essay integrates taste variation into the utility maximisation framework. In both of these essays, I develop my testable results into practical algorithms that allow one to recover salient features of individual preferences. In my second essay, a methodology is developed to recover the minimal intrahousehold heterogeneity in theory-consistent discount rates, whilst my final essay develops a quadratic programming procedure that facilitates the recovery of the minimal interpersonal and intertemporal heterogeneity in tastes that is required to rationalise observed choice patterns. Applying these techniques to consumption micro-data yields new empirical insights that are of relevance to the applied literatures on time discounting, family economics and the public policy debate on tobacco control.
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Noury, Abdul Ghafar. "Essays on Economics of political Behavior." Doctoral thesis, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, 2001. http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/211488.
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Tacharoen, Kitjawat. "Essays on effects of skill mix on productivity and determinants of foreign ownership in developing countries." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2012. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/563/.
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The first chapter is titled "Productivity As If Space Mattered: An Application to Factor Markets Across China”. Optimal production decisions depend on local market characteristics. This chapter develops a model to explain firm labour demand and firm density across regions. Firms vary in their technology to combine imperfectly substitutable worker types, and locate across regions with distinct distributions of workers and wages. Firm technologies which best match regional labour markets explain both productivity differences and firm density. Estimating structural model parameters is simple and relies on a two stage OLS procedure. The first stage estimates local market conditions using firm employment and regional data, while the second incorporates regional costs into production function estimation. The method is applied to Chinese manufacturing, population census and geographic data to estimate local market costs and production technologies. In line with the model, we find that labour markets which provide cost advantages explain substantial differences in firm productivity. Furthermore, regions which have lower optimal hiring costs attract more firms per capita. This is a joint work with Wenya Cheng and Dr John Morrow. The second chapter is called “Foreign Ownership Share and Property Rights: Evidence from Thai Manufacturing Firms”. Existing work based on property-rights theories treat ownership as binary and the degree of integration as exogenous. This chapter proposes a property-rights model where the degree of integration is endogenised and treated as a continuous variable. The model makes two predictions for firm behaviour under vertical integration. Firstly, foreign ownership shares should increase with the significance of foreign investors’ investment. Secondly, the effect of investors’ investment on ownership increases with the elasticity of substitution across product varieties. Both predictions find considerable support in firm-level data from Thailand. The third chapter, “Product Quality and Intra-firm Trade”, presents a partial equilibrium model with product quality differentiation where heterogeneous firms choose whether to vertically integrate their foreign suppliers or outsource input production. Quality is non-verifiable by third parties which causes the well-known hold-up problem. The severity of the problem increases with product quality. The model yields closed form expression for the productivity threshold that assigns firms into different ownership structures. The impact of quality related parameters on the threshold is analysed in detail.
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Goldsmith, Glenn Fraser. "Essays in the economics of subjective well-being." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:0106206d-80b7-45f9-9850-cd8e7d5c0e97.
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This thesis explores three major issues in the burgeoning empirical literature on the determinants of subjective well-being (SWB). While economic theory assumes that it is current consumption that matters to SWB, empirical work has focused almost exclusively on the effect of income. In Part 1, we use household panel data from Russia and Britain to show that neither the standard theoretical account, nor the standard empirical practice may be adequate. Consumption, income, and wealth each contribute separately to SWB, in particular via perceptions of status and anticipation of the future; and omitting consumption from SWB equations significantly understates the importance of money to SWB. Distinguishing between consumption and income is also important to identifying reference effects. In Part 2, we confirm earlier findings that others' income has a positive (informational) effect on SWB in Russia, but show that others' consumption has an offsetting negative (comparison) effect. The net effect depends on how we define individuals' reference groups. We develop a novel econometric model that lets us estimate these reference groups from the data. Contrary to previous results, we conclude that comparison dominates information. Most SWB analyses focus on the average effects of money, relationships, and other outcomes across a given population; yet there may be significant differences in what is important to different people. In Part 3, we employ parametric and semi-parametric random coefficient models to show that there are large differences in the determinants of individual SWB in Britain, and (in contrast to previous work) that such differences cannot simply be attributed to differences in individuals' reporting functions. While individual differences correlate with (some) observable demographic variables, they do not generally correlate with individuals' perceptions about what is important to them. The results of SWB research may therefore be a useful source of information.
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Ibhagui, Oyakhilome Wallace. "Essays in empirical international finance and growth : a closer look at Sub-Saharan Africa." Thesis, University of Kent, 2018. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/66699/.
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The thesis, comprising three chapters in empirical international finance and growth, with a focus on SubSaharan Africa, examines the growth impact of foreign direct investment in the first chapter, the existence of a transfer problem and the effects of financial liberalisation on real exchange rate in the second chapter, and whether monetary fundamentals explain nominal exchange rate movements in SSA in ways consistent with the monetary model of exchange rate in the third chapter. The contribution of the thesis to knowledge is mainly empirical - it consists of using a broad range of existing econometric models to comprehensively test some important but hitherto untested hypotheses and specific theories in international economics within the context of Sub-Saharan Africa, and to obtain findings that improve our understanding of the behaviour of relevant economic variables in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Brendon, Charles Frederick. "Essays in normative macroeconomics." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:f4531e94-54bf-43f6-843f-5d37054476f1.
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This thesis is divided into two main parts. The first provides a novel analysis of dynamic optimal taxation under the assumption that individuals in an economy have ‘hidden’ idiosyncratic productivity levels. Specifically, it shows how to derive a complete set of optimality conditions characterising the solution to a problem of this kind. The method relies on constructing perturbations to the consumption-output allocations of agents in a manner that preserves all relevant incentive compatibility restrictions. We are able to use it to generalise the ‘inverse Euler condition’ to cases in which preferences are non-separable between consumption and labour supply, and to prove a number of novel results about optimal income and savings tax wedges. The second main part investigates a more general problem. When policymakers are constrained in their present choices by expectations of future outcomes a well-known time-inconsistency problem hinders optimal decision-making: the preferences of policymakers who exist at different points in time are not in agreement with one another, because of differences in the constraints faced by each. We present a new approach to determining policy in this setting, based on asking: What policy would be chosen by a decisionmaker who did not know the time period in which their choice was to be implemented? This is akin to designing institutions from behind a Rawlsian ‘veil of ignorance’. The theory is used to obtain qualitative policy prescriptions across a number of environments; these policies have several appealing properties that we outline.
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Popa, Nicoleta-Laura. "Romanian teachers of the gifted : empathy and accuracy in perceiving students' characteristics : a scientific essay in social sciences /." Nijmegen : Quickprint, 2005. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb40218305h.
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Morando, Greta. "Essays on the economics of education and labour." Thesis, University of Essex, 2017. http://repository.essex.ac.uk/19999/.
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Chapter 1 provides the first evaluation of a recent educational reform in England which reduced the content of the mathematics module studied by pupils aged 16-18. Using the National Pupil Database we look at the reform's impact on the probability that secondary school students will choose mathematics, and their attainment. We use information on previous academic achievement and other individual characteristics to understand which students have been mostly affected. We show that this reform sheds new light on one of the most important questions in education research: why women are less represented in STEM fields. In Chapter 2, we exploit variation in the labour demand to investigate whether the first job destination of graduates from different socio-economic backgrounds is differently affected by the business cycle. We use the Destination of Leavers from Higher Education survey and the Labour Force Survey across the period 2003-12. When the labour market is tight graduates from disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to choose to study for a professional qualification. Those who become active labour market participants have more trouble finding a job, and those who find employment experience lower job quality. We provide evidence of the importance of social capital in explaining these findings. In Chapter 3 we contribute to a recent branch of the economic literature on how social integration affects labour market opportunities. This literature compares the labour market outcomes of ethnic minorities who are in a co-ethnic partnership to those who choose a partner in the majority population . An important pre-requisite of these analyses is the extent to which these two types of partnerships can be compared. We analyse this hypothesis formally using a propensity score approach in Understanding Society data. The characteristics of these partnerships are such that they should not be compared even within narrowly defined subgroups.
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Andersson, Mats. "Empirical Essays on Railway Infrastructure Costs in Sweden." Doctoral thesis, Stockholm, 2007. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-4398.
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Baghaei, Lakeh Arash. "Essays on Utilizing Data Analytics and Dynamic Modeling to Inform Complex Science and Innovation Policies." Diss., Virginia Tech, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/95009.
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In many ways, science represents a complex system which involves technical, social, and economic aspects. An analysis of such a system requires employing and combining different methodological perspectives and incorporation of different sources of data. In this dissertation, we use a variety of methods to analyze large sets of data in order to examine the effects of various domestic and institutional factors on scientific activities. First, we evaluate how the contributions of behavioral and social sciences to studies of health have evolved over time. We use data analytics to conduct a textual analysis of more than 200,000 publications on the topic of HIV/AIDS. We find that the focus of the scientific community within the context of the same problem varies as the societal context of the problem changes. Specifically, we uncover that the focus on the behavioral and social aspects of HIV/AIDS has increased over time and varies in different countries. Further, we show that this variation is related to the mortality level that the disease causes in each country. Second, we investigate how different sources of funding affect the science enterprise differently. We use data analytics to analyze more than 60,000 papers published on the subject of specific diseases globally and highlight the role of philanthropic money in these domains. We find that philanthropies tend to have a more practical approach in health studies as compared with public funders. We further show that they are also concerned with the economic, policy related, social, and behavioral aspects of the diseases. We uncover that philanthropies tend to mix and combine approaches and contents supported both by public and private sources of funding for science. We further show that in doing so, philanthropies tend to be closer to the position held by the public sector in the context of health studies. Finally, we find that studies funded by philanthropies tend to receive higher citations, and hence have higher impact, in comparison to those funded by the public sector. Third, we study the effect of different schemes of funding distribution on the career of scientists. In this study, we develop a system dynamics model for analyzing a scientist's career under different funding and competition contexts. We investigate the characteristics of optimal strategies and also the equilibrium points for the cases of scientists competing for financial resources. We show that a policy to fund the best can lead scientists to spend more time on writing proposals, in order to secure funding, rather than writing papers. We find that when everyone receives funding (or have the same chance of receiving funding) the overall optimal payoff of the scientists reaches its highest level and at this optimum, scientists spend all their time on writing papers rather than writing proposals. Our analysis suggests that more egalitarian distributions of funding results in higher overall research output by scientists. We also find that luck plays an important role in the success of scientists. We show that following the optimal strategies do not guarantee success. Due to the stochastic nature of funding decisions, some will eventually fail. The failure is not due to scientists' faulty decisions, but rather simply due to their lack of luck.Ph. D.
Science helps us understand the world and enables us to improve how we interact with our environment. But science itself has also been the subject of inquiry by philosophers, sociologists, economists, historians, and scientists. The goal in the investigations of science has been to better understand how scientific advances occur, how to foster innovation, and how to improve the institutions that push science forward. This dissertation contributes to this area of research by asking and responding to several questions about the science enterprise. First, we study how communities of scientists in different parts of the world look at the seemingly same problem differently. We use a computational method to read through a large set of publications on the topic of HIV/AIDS (which includes more than 200,000 papers) and uncover the topics of these papers. We find that in the context of HIV/AIDS, contributions of behavioral and social scientists have increased over time. Moreover, we show that the share of these contributions in any counties’ total research output differs significantly. We further find that there is a significant relationship between one country’s rate of death, due to HIV/AIDS, and the share of behavioral and social studies in the overall research profile of that country on the topic of HIV/AIDS. Second, we investigate how different sources of research funding affect scientific activities differently. Specifically, we focus on the role of philanthropic money in science and its effect on the content and impact of research studies. In our analysis, we rely on computational techniques that distinguishes between different themes of research in the studies of a few diseases and also different statistical methods. We find that philanthropies tend to have a more practical approach to health studies as compared with public sources of funding. Meanwhile, we find that they are also concerned with the economic, policy related, social, and behavioral aspects of the diseases. Moreover, we show that philanthropies tend to mix and combine approaches and contents supported both by public and private sources of funding for science. We find that, in doing so, philanthropies tend to be closer to the position held by the public sector in the context of health studies. Finally, we show that studies funded by philanthropies tend to receive higher citations. This finding suggests that these studies have a higher impact in comparison to those funded by the public sector. Third, we study how different mechanisms for distributing research funding among scientists can affect their career and success. Many scientists should spend time on both writing papers and research grant proposals. In this work, we aim at understanding how a scientists should allocate her time between these two activities to maximize her career long number of papers. We develop a small mathematical model to capture the mechanisms related to the research career of a scientist in an academic setting. Then, for different schemes of funding distribution, we find the scientist’s time allocation that maximizes the number of papers she publishes over her career. We find that when funding is being allocated to the best scientists and best grant proposals, scientists’ best strategy is to spend more time on writing research grant proposals rather than papers. This decreases the total number of papers published by the scientists over their career. We also find that luck is important in determining the career success of scientists. Due to errors in evaluation of proposal qualities, a scientist may fail in her career regardless of whether she has followed the best strategy that she could.
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Kang, Lili. "Essays on human capital and productivity analysis in China." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3241/.
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This thesis examines the Chinese economy by focusing on the specialized human capital themes of production processes, regional productivity disparities and convergence, cost competitiveness comparisons and private returns to education from 1978 to 2009. Chapter 2 reviews the growth accounting model and measurement methods of its components such as capital services, labour inputs, labour composition index and Total Factor Productivity index. China’s spectacular economic growth is from unequal performance of provinces and regions. Thus, chapter 3 examines effects of the physical and human capital on disparities and convergence of labour productivity, Total Factor Productivity and average wages in China, incorporating the market reform factors. We find that composition-adjusted human capital is more important than capital services in the production function. We also overcome the endogeneity of schooling in the wage function with instrumental variables. In chapter 4, we discuss industrial disparities and convergence across countries and provinces from labour costs perspective to figure out industries with comparative competitiveness advantage. Moreover, we correct the Heckman selection bias problems of education returns in chapter 5. We find that education returns keep on rising over time, which support human capital hypothesis rather than the signalling effect for all age groups except the group educated during the “Cultural Revolution”.
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Berlin, Noemi. "Four essays on the psychological determinants of risk-taking, education and economic performance." Phd thesis, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - Paris I, 2013. http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00984291.
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This thesis contributes to the experimental literature on the role played by psychological factors in educational choices implying risk-taking and performance. Using psychological insights to study economic behaviors has become a discipline on its own. Its main goal is to explain most of the mechanisms involved in the process of decision making process. The reason for introducing concepts of psychology into economic theory is mainly because "classic" economic models are often questioned on the decision-making process they propose. Even though these models are a first step for the elaboration of economic policies, the assumptions made are usually a simplification of the economic agent's behaviors. This dissertation considers an analysis on specific psychological determinants: risk preferences, self-confidence, personality and creativity. We also evaluate gender effects. The studied decisions and behaviors are systematically related to educational choices, even though most of the chapters are presented in a more general framework and can thus be applied to other decisions implying the same mechanisms such as career choices. The first part is dedicated to investigate the effect of confidence (in one's own abilities) on two types of decisions that involves a risky dimension: the (individual) decision of continuing the activity or not with an increasing difficulty, and the decision to enter competition. Both of these activities rely on an unknown distribution of probabilities of success. Confidence therefore becomes the subjective probability. First, (chapter 1), we consider absolute self-confidence which can vary with aspiration and ability levels. Second, (chapter 2), we focus on relative self-confidence which can be modulated by a feedback receipt and the gender of the individual. We show that self-confidence, which varies with these different dimensions, has an impact on performances and observed decisions. The second part of this dissertation focuses on teenagers. We present two studies on the psychological determinants of schooling achievement and on risk preferences. Chapter 3 examines if schooling achievement (measured by schooling grades during the year) can be explained by creativity and personality. We also observe a different gender effect on a national exam success and schooling grades. Chapter 4 improves the understanding of teenagers' risk preferences in order to improve policies aimed for them.