Tesis sobre el tema "Applied Economics"

Thesis advisor: Arthur Lewbel
This dissertation consists of three self-contained papers in applied econometrics. The frrst chapter, Testing Multivariate Distributions (joint with Jushan Bai), proposes a new method to test multivariate distributions with a focus on multivariate normality and multivariate t distribution, motivated in part by examination of financial market data. Using Khmaladze's martingale transformation to purge the effect of parameter estimation, our test generates a distribution-free statistic and can be easily applied to cases with complicated parameters. Simulation shows our test has good size and power. Finally, we apply our test procedure to a real multivariate financial time series. The result is consistent with the well-known fat tail property of financial data. The second chapter, Measuring the Poverty Line in China - An Equivalence Scale Method, is motivated by the current urban poverty issue in China. The fundamental question is: given the poverty threshold for an individual, how should that threshold vary across households with different demographic characteristics? This paper uses urban Household survey (uHS) data of China to estimate the equivalence scales for Chinese urban households. The results provide a quantitative reference to calculate the comparable poverty lines for households with different demographic compositions. It also can be used to determine appropriate subsidy levels for demographically different households. A useful byproduct of this exercise is the specification of a demand system for China. The third chapter, Dynamics of City Growth: Random or Deterministic? Evidence From China (joint with Shihe Fu), tests the random growth theory and the endogenous growth theory in urban economics using Chinese city size data from 1984-2002. We implement unit root and cointegration tests on pooled heterogeneous cities in the country. Since China is still in the period of rapid urbanization, we can only tentatively conclude that the overall Chinese city growth does not follow either random growth or parallel growth. However, we find that a small number of cities with certain common characteristics do grow parallel
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2005
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

This thesis consists of four essays. In the first essay, I examine how the historical planter elite of the Southern US affected economic development at the county level between 1840 and 1960. I find that counties with a relatively wealthier planter elite before the Civil War performed significantly worse in the post-war decades and even after World War II. In the second essay we investigate the link between religious membership and rainfall risk across US counties in the second half of the nineteenth century. Our results indicate that church membership and seating capacity were significantly larger in counties likely to have been subject to greater rainfall risk. In the third essay, we examine the effect of removing restriction to bank entry on bank failures exploiting the introduction of free banking laws in US states during the 1837-1863 period. Our main finding is that counties in free banking states experienced significantly more bank failures. In the fourth essay we examine the effects that within-county changes in the cultural composition of the US population had on output growth during the age of mass migration. Our main finding is that increases in cultural fractionalization significantly increased output, while increases in cultural polarization significantly decreased output.
Aquesta tesi consisteix en quatre articles. En el primer assaig, s’examina com l’èlit històrica del sud dels EUA va afectar el desenvolupament econòmic a nivell de comtat entre 1840 i 1960. He trobat que els comtats amb una èlit relativament més rica abans de la Guerra Civil empitjoraven significativament en les dècades de la postguerra i fins després de la Segona Guerra Mundial. En el segon assaig s’investiga la relació entre l’afiliació religiosa i el risc de pluja a través dels comtats dels Estats Units en la segona meitat del segle XIX. Els nostres resultats indiquen que la comunitat de l’església i el nombre de seients van ser significativament majors en els comtats amb probabilitats d’haver estat subjectes a un major risc de pluja. En el tercer assaig, s’analitza l’efecte de l’eliminació de restriccions a l’entrada de bancs en la fallida de bancs que exploten la introducció de les lleis del “free banking” als estats dels EUA durant el període 1837-1863. La nostra principal conclusió és que els comtats en els estats amb “free banking” experimentaven significativament més fracassos bancaris. En el quart assaig s’examinen els efectes que els canvis dins del comtat en la composició cultural de la població dels EUA, van tenir en el creixement de la producció durant l’era de la migració massiva. La nostra principal conclusió és que l’augment de fragmentació cultural, van augmentar significativament la producció, mentre que l’augment de la polarització cultural, disminuia significativament la producció.

This thesis is composed of three self-contained chapters. In the first chapter, I propose a theoretical model that shows that trusting strangers is one of the channels through which institutions determine positive economic outcomes, such as entrepreneurship, but also negative ones, like corruption. The model predicts that the individual-level relationship between honesty and trust changes depending on institutional quality. I present empirical evidence in support of this prediction. In the second chapter, I study which share of ethnic enclaves in the U.S. can be attributed to spillover forces operating at the industry-location level among compatriots. I propose a micro-founded index that allows the estimation of the strength of such spillovers. I bring this index to the data and I find that immigrants who might have more difficulties in interacting with non-compatriots benefit more from this type of spillovers. In the third chapter, I empirically document that the main patterns on firms' globalization decisions found in the international trade literature on multinational firms extend to the Spanish hotel industry.
Aquesta tesi està formada per tres capítols independents. En el primer, proposo un model teòric que mostra que la confiança en desconeguts és un dels canals a través dels quals les institucions determinen resultats econòmics positius com l'emprenedoria, però també d'altres negatius com la corrupció. El model prediu que la relació a nivell individual entre honestedat i confiança varia en funció de la qualitat institucional. Presento evidència empírica que dóna suport a aquesta predicció. En el segon capítol, estudio fins a quin punt l'existència d'spillovers que operen a nivell d'indústria-localització entre compatriotes determina els enclavaments ètnics als EUA. Amb aquest objectiu, proposo un model que permet estimar la intensitat d'aquests spillovers. Estimo aquest índex utilitzant dades del cens del EUA i concloc que els immigrants que poden tenir més dificultats en interaccionar amb no-compatriotes es beneficien més d'aquest tipus d'spillovers. En el tercer capítol, documento empíricament que les principals relacions sobre les decisions d'internacionalització que s'han trobat a la literatura de comerç internacional de les empreses multinacionals també s'estenen a la indústria hotelera espanyola.

Chapter 1. In the 1970s, competition policy in the United States banking sector changed from exempting competition to liberalization and deregulation. Competition not only plays an important role in allocational efficiency but it is also essential for long-term economic growth. This chapter develops a model of banking contributions to evaluate to what extent banks affect the level of competition in the banking sector, and tests the model's predictions using a novel detailed dataset which includes all contributions made by banks from 1993 to 2010 in the United States. Controlling for banks' characteristics, the results are consistent with the model's predictions and show show that a higher level of contributions increases the Lerner index (as a measure of competition) or in the other words, decreases the level of competition. Chapter 2. This chapter provides the first empirical evidence that market structure affects the electoral power of firms as special interest groups. Firms not only affect the election outcomes by making contributions to their preferred candidates, they also enforce social norms among their members by encouraging them to vote for the candidate with the most closely-aligned interests. This chapter uses a linear probability model to analyze 574 open-seat races for the House of Representatives in the United States between 1990 and 2014. The results show that, even when controlling for the total value of contributions made to a candidate, political donations made by firms with high market power have a positive effect on the candidates' probability of winning. The findings are consistent with the idea from collective action theory that concentrated industries are more likely to behave as an organized interest group to advance their interests. Chapter 3. Ethnic heterogeneity is an important factor in the formation of human sexual network and the prevalence of STDs. Racial and ethnic ties create closed social networks with rigid in-group boundaries and hampers the intra-group dissemination of information. Slow information flow among groups facilitates the spread of STDs by encouraging individuals to ethnically diversify their sexual partners in order to lower the chance of getting caught cheating. Analyzing a cross-province sample of 39,830 sexually active adults driven from the 2013-2014 Canadian Community Health Survey, we find that individuals who live in a highly ethnically diversified neighbourhood are more susceptible to STDs compared to ones who live in a ethnically homogenous neighbourhood. Evidence from several robustness checks suggests that the relationship is causal.

Chapter 1 ---Does the party of government influence the amount and type of inward foreign investment? The results of a number of correlational studies provide inconsistent evidence. However none of these studies - for any level of government or any jurisdiction - have used methods that allow them to speak to causal effects. Regression discontinuity (RD) method is applied to a set of narrow-margin US gubernatorial elections. Over the course of a four-year term the election of a Republican governor causes a 21% boost in the growth of manufacturing-oriented FDI stock, compared to a Democrat. This effect is robust to a series of challenges. However, the same approach provides no evidence that partisanship matters for the overall level of FDI. Chapter 2 ---Does an economic shock open a window of opportunity for reform, and if it does, how does the institution of a state play a role? The paper investigates how economic shocks affect the structural reforms in various institutions. This paper addresses this issue by using the exogenous variation in the international price of large commodity goods to generate the exogenous change in national income. The analysis relies on a unique mapping between new annual data from 1962 to 2005 on economic shocks from commodity prices and structural reforms in 111 countries. I find significant heterogeneous effects across sectors in autocratic countries. In autocracies, positive economic shocks promote reforms in real sectors, but deter reforms in financial sectors. However the impact of economic shocks on structural reform in democratic countries is nil. Chapter 3 ---The deregulation of branch banking across the United States substantially increased the availability of credit to existing borrowers and others who has previously been excluded. Exploiting the staggered timing of changes across states for identification it is estimated that deregulation caused a 3.3% increase in rates of suicide and a 4.7% increase in rates of divorce. This is consistent with a large body of evidence linking excess debt to various measures of individual and relationship distress. Results are in most cases statistically significant at levels much higher than 1%, and prove resilient in a battery of robustness checks and falsification exercises.

The first essay of this dissertation focuses on studying the relationship between private politics and corporate environmentalism. This work analyzes the determinants and effects of two private political actions, boycotts and proxy contests. The analysis shows that: (i) the size of a firm is an important predictor of whether a firm will be chosen as a target of an activist campaign; (ii) firms headquartered in states with larger environmental constituencies are more likely to be targeted by activist campaigns; (iii) "dirty firms" (with larger relative or absolute emissions and/or high level of regulatory scrutiny) are more likely to become targets of an activist campaign; and (iv) private political campaigns are effective in improving the environmental performance of their targets. The second essay examines the trends in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) and investigates the effects of major changes in the economy on measures of TFP in eight industries during the Interwar period from 1919 through 1939. TFP estimates show that each industry followed a different path of TFP change. There is no consistent evidence on large TFP decline during the years 1929-33 in the industries studied, as proposed in the literature. TFP measures also do not support the hypothesis that the 1930s were a period of interrupted TFP growth but there is evidence that five industries out of eight had higher productivity in the 1930s than in the 1920s. Regression analysis of major determinants of the TFP change for the motor vehicles and the cotton goods industry shows that TFP fell with increases in employment and strike activity. The NRA code might have also contributed to a decline in TFP.

This thesis includes three empirical essays which cover different topics. Before moving to the main chapters, I would like to briefly discuss the research question and main findings of each project. Chapter 1 Black-White Wage Convergence in the United States This paper explores whether there is a pattern of heterogeneous wage convergence between black and white workers in the Southern US relative to the Non-Southern US during the post-Civil Rights era. Heterogeneity in relation to the South may be plausibly associated with a range of determinants: the region’s historical experience of slavery, different observable factors, or changing political and social institutions. My evidence from US Census data for 1980, 1990 and 2000 indicates that a strong pattern of “black-black” and “black-white” wage convergence exists between Southern born and Non-Southern born individuals. This wage convergence pattern, particularly amongst black workers, is similar across Southern states associated with different historical intensities of slavery, but it is stronger and more persistent for the low wage groups in the South. In addition, the wage convergence is mainly from the low wage quartile groups. My assessment of the impact of institutional changes as a driver of wage convergence suggests that the changes associated with rising political competition from 1960 to 1980 contributed to rising black wages. Chapter 2 Hate Crime and Victory of Obama This paper examines whether Obama’s 2008 electoral victory affected hate crimes. Hate crime data from 2005 to 2012 indicate that anti-black and total hate crimes declined significantly in Blue States after Obama won the election, relative to Red States. The drop is even more significant in States that supported the Democratic presidential candidates in the 2004 and 2008 elections. Moreover, this decline is highly associated with the decreasing education gap between black people and white people. These findings suggest that Obama’s victory played a role in reducing the number of hate crimes in the US. Chapter 3 The Long-Run Labor Market Consequences of Being Born in A Bad Economy Recent studies have shown that an economic or environmental shock at an early stage of life can have a negative long-term impact on health status as well as educational and labour market outcomes. In this study, I examine whether being born during an economic recession affects later-life earnings. By utilising 2000 US Census data, I find that males born between 1965 and 1979 experienced a 1 percent of earning loss with every one unit increase in the unemployment rate at year of birth. The effect is similar in those with and without college education. Moreover, the effect is stronger in the low wage quartile groups. These findings suggest that the labour market consequences of being born in a recession are negative and persistent.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, February 2007.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation is composed of three chapters, the first demonstrates that natural gas violates many of the simplifying assumptions frequently used in modeling its behavior. Careful analysis of futures contracts written on gas suggests that gas prices are seasonal while returns are non-Gaussian and evidence stochastic volatility. In addition, examination of options prices indicates the intermittent presence of jumps. We find that models which disregard these properties struggle to recover options prices with any precision. Thus, we propose an alternative nonparametric approach to gas options pricing that captures these salient features while also shedding light on the nature of risk aversion embedded in gas markets. The second chapter presents new estimates and approaches to estimating the home bias puzzle. It uses micro-level data to calculate households' foreign equity exposure as a function of wealth. We find simple estimates have significant errors-in-variables problems and we construct an estimator using grouping to account for this issue. Our estimates still imply low aggregate investment in foreign equity. Finally, we disaggregate the investment decision by incorporating two step decisions that allow households to forgo participating in the market.
(cont.) As a result of the decoupling, we find foreign equity levels closer to that of standard portfolio theories. The final chapter considers principal-agent models in which the principal cannot measure the output nor the effort level of agents. To model this situation, we use utility models that include identity, justified partly by empirical results from peer-effects, and apply these extended utility functions. In the single agent case, introducing identity amounts to modifying the utility function and does not lead to dramatic results. In the multiple agent case, we find that the addition of identity can lead to more efficient outcomes than cases where identity is ignored. The addition of identity, however, can also lead to counter-intuitive results due to the interactions among agents and may produce second-best outcomes that are worse than the case without identity. Finally the addition of identity can help explain some empirical results that may be difficult to explain with standard models.
by Alan Michael Grant.
Ph.D.

Chapter 1 addresses the relationship between political institutions and economic development. It first provides an extensive survey of the related theoretical and empirical literature and then investigates empirically how such a relationship evolved over the period 1870-2005. Results show that political institutions are initially irrelevant and tend to become increasingly important with time in explaining cross-country differences in income per capita. Consistent with the modernization view of the literature, results also seem to suggest that the importance of democracy nowadays might be mostly explained by prior improvements in the standards of living and, in particular, in the levels of education. Chapter 2, jointly with Vincenzo Bove, presents a case study analysis of the impact of coups d'etat on defence spending. We use the synthetic control method and compare the evolution of the defence burden for countries affected by coups with the evolution of an artificial control group. We find that successful coups determine a large increase in defence burden, as they directly affect the bargaining power of the military. When no effects or a decrease in the defence burden is found, it is often the consequence of a democratisation process triggered by the coup. Failed coups, instead, produce a smaller, and mostly positive, effect on military burden, possibly a result of coup-proofing strategies. Chapter 3 explores to what extent the receipt of funding during Ph.D. encourages post-degree research career (extensive margins) and influences research productivity after graduation (intensive margins). Results uncover a significant and positive impact of funding .on early research outcomes at both margins and are robust to different model specifications and outcome measures. One possible explanation, as suggested by additional estimates is that funded students invest more in research-oriented activities (i.e. visiting research programs) and spend less time working part-time while studying.

This thesis studies the role of policies aimed at facilitating communication on economic and political development. In the first chapter, I explore the relationship between long-term spatial persistence and trade. Using a reduced form approach combined with a dynamic spatial general equilibrium model, I show that an important determinant of the importance of trade in shaping the location of economic activity is the level of development as a country experiences reductions in international trade costs. The second chapter studies the role of change in the communication network in Norway on mass political behavior. The paper investigates the effect of the liberalization of Norwegian broadcasting on political behavior. We find evidence consistent with the policy reducing political participation. The third chapter studies a policy that expanded broadband access in the context of Norway. We find a positive effect of high-speed internet usage on the turnout rate in municipal elections but only a small effect on polarization in vote choice.
Esta tesis estudia el impacto de políticas enfocadas en facilitar una mejor comunicación sobre el desarrollo económico y político. En el primer capítulo exploro la relación entre la persistencia espacial de largo plazo y el comercio de bienes utilizando una aproximación econométrica de forma reducida, junto con un modelo dinámico espacial de equilibrio general. En el artículo demuestro que cuando un país enfrenta reducciones en los costos de comerciar con otros países, el nivel de desarrollo de dicho país es un fundamental para determinar la importancia que el comercio internacional tendrá sobre la ubicación geográfica de la actividad económica. El segundo capítulo estudia el papel de los cambios en la red de telecomunicaciones en Noruega sobre el comportamiento político de las masas. El artículo investiga el efecto que tuvo la liberalización de los derechos de radiodifusión en Noruega sobre el comportamiento político. Encontramos evidencia de que dicha liberalización redujo la participación política de la ciudadanía. El tercer capítulo estudia una política que expandió el acceso a red de banda ancha en Noruega. Encontramos que el mayor uso de internet de alta velocidad tuvo un efecto positivo en la participación electoral en elecciones municipales, pero solo un pequeño efecto sobre la polarización observada en la elección de los votantes.

Cette thèse utilise des expériences naturelles pour tester des théories économiques. L'objectif principal est de tester des théories en économie de la santé en utilisant des données provenant de pays développés et en voie de développement. Le deuxième chapitre documente le développement de l'industrie du sexe en Thaïlande au cours des dernières décennies et montre que l'incertitude quant à la qualité des services sexuels mène à la concentration des firmes. De plus, nous étudions dans le troisième chapitre si des taxes et des interdictions de consommation de biens addictifs dans les lieux publics peuvent avoir un impact sur l'utilité des agents économiques. Nous étudions l'impact d'interdictions de fumer dans les lieux publics sur le bien-être des fumeurs et documente un effet négatif juste avant l'introduction de cette politique et un effet positif après. Les fumeurs sont également plus enclins à être en faveur de ces politiques ex post. Le quatrième chapitre vérifie si le revenu des voisins a un effet sur le bien-être. Les résultats présentés dans cet essai suggèrent que le revenu des voisins affecte le bien-être via la comparaison de revenu et les biens publics. Dans le cinquième chapitre, nous étudions l'effet d'un changement dans les subventions aux services de garde sur la santé des parents. Nos estimations suggèrent des effets positifs importants sur le bien-être, le sommeil et le stress pour les mères avec un diplôme d'études secondaires. Ces résultats semblent confirmer une hypothèse de Second Shift. Le sixième chapitre traite de la transparence dans la recherche et documente comment les incitatifs à publier peuvent affecter la distribution des tests statistiques
This thesis applies quasi-natural experiments to test insights from economic theory, The primary focus is to test economic theories in the fields of health and urban economics using data from developed and developing countries. The second chapter documents the development of the Thai sex industry over the past decades and shows that uncertainty about quality leads to the concentration of firms. In addition, I also analyze in another chapter whether taxes or bans of addictive goods may affect agents' utility. I study whether smoking policies could affect smokers' well-being. I find that the introduction of a smoking ban has a negative impact on smokers' life satisfaction just before the introduction and a positive impact afterward. The fourth chapter verifies whether neighbors' income affect well-being. Neighbors' income may affect well-being through many channels and the strength of those channels may depend on the size of the. Locality. The results suggest that the effect of neighbors' income on well-being is driven by income comparisons and amenities. The fifth chapter analyzes the impacts of child care subsidies on parents' labor force participation and health. We find that child care subsidies have large and positive effects on the self-reported well-being of lower-educated mothers. These positive effects are also felt on health measures such as a good sleep and lower stress. This last piece of evidence is consistent with a Second Shift hypothesis. The sixth chapter focuses on research transparency in economics and documents how incentives to publish affect the distribution of test statistics

Cette thèse, structurée en trois essais, aborde des problématiques relatives à l’économie dupersonnel et l’économie du développement. Mes deux premiers essais étudient de façon expérimentale les explications possibles de l’absence de l’arbitrage entre le risque et les incitations dans les contrats. Mon troisième essai analyse l’impact de la maternité et de l’éducation sur l’emploi autonome des femmes dans les pays en développement. Dans le premier chapitre, nous analysons la robustesse interne et externe des mesures expérimentales des préférences pour le risque. Les paramètres de préférence pour le risque sont estimés à l’aide d’une série d’expériences de terrain, réalisées dans une entreprise de plantation d’arbres de taille moyenne en Colombie-Britannique. Notre expérience de mesure des préférences pour le risque est construite selon l’approche de Holt et Laury (2002) d’abord avec des loteries à gains faibles puis avec des loteries à gains élevés. Durant l’expérience avec des gains faibles, les participants peuvent gagner entre 2 et 77 dollars. Les montants des loteries sont doublés durant l’expérience avec des gains élevés. Nos résultats montrent que les préférences pour le risque révélées par les travailleurs changent lorsque les montants en jeu augmentent mais la distribution agrégée des préférences pour le risque est restée stable entre les deux traitements. Par la suite, nous analysons la capacité des paramètres de préférence de risque estimés à partir des deux traitements à prédire le choix des travailleurs entre un contrat à la pièce et un contrat à salaire fixe. Les résultats montrent que les préférences pour le risque révélées lorsque les gains sont élevés, prédisent efficacement les choix de contrat. À l’inverse, les préférences pour le risque estimées lorsque les gains sont faibles, ne prédisent pas le choix de contrat. Nous en déduisons donc que l’augmentation des montants en jeu durant l’expérience motive les travailleurs à jouer la loterie plus sérieusement et ainsi révéler leurs préférences réelles pour le risque. Dans le deuxième chapitre, nous analysons le biais de perception des travailleurs sur la distribution de leur revenu. Une explication possible à l’absence d’arbitrage risque-incitations dans les données contractuelles est que les travailleurs ont une perception incorrecte du risque auquel ils font face dans les contrats. En effet, si les travailleurs sous-estiment le risque, ils seront prêts à travailler dans un environnement très risqué en exigeant une prime de risque plus faible. Ceci réduirait alors le coût de l’incitation pour l’entreprise et supprimerait alors l’arbitrage risque-incitations qui devrait exister dans les contrats. Nous analysons cette problématique en utilisant une série d’expériences de terrain auprès des travailleurs d’une firme de plantation d’arbres en Colombie-Britannique. Au cours de l’expérience, les travailleurs, payés à la pièce, doivent prédire leurs gains espérés sur une durée de 10 jours. À l’aide d’un questionnaire, nous avons obtenu la distribution prédite des gains quotidiens par chaque travailleur. Ensuite, nous construisons la distribution réelle des gains de ces travailleurs en utilisant les données de paie fournies par la firme à l’issue de la saison de plantation. Notre stratégie empirique consiste à apparier la distribution de gains prédite par chaque travailleur avec la distribution réelle des gains pour évaluer l’écart potentiel entre ces deux distributions. Les résultats confirment la présence d’un biais de perception des travailleurs sur leurs gains potentiels sous le contrat de travail à la pièce. En effet, les travailleurs surestiment leurs gains journaliers moyens et sous-estiment la variabilité de leurs gains journaliers et donc le risque auquel ils font face. Par la suite, nos résultats montrent que la sous-estimation du risque accroît la probabilité des travailleurs à choisir un contrat à la pièce au détriment d’un contrat à salaire fixe. Le troisième chapitre s’intéresse à l’impact de la maternité et de l’éducation sur l’emploi autonome des femmes. En effet, la présence d’enfants en bas âge est souvent désignée dans la littérature comme le déterminant principal de l’emploi autonome des femmes. Toutefois, peu d’évidences empiriques existent dans les pays en développement pour confirmer cette idée. À l’aide de données micro-économiques, nous estimons les effets de la maternité et de l’éducation sur la probabilité d’une femme d’exercer un emploi autonome en Ouganda. Notre stratégie empirique combine l’estimation d’un modèle de type Heckman qui corrige le biais de sélection lié à la participation des femmes sur le marché du travail avec des fonctions de contrôle corrigeant pour l’endogénéité de la fertilité et de l’éducation. Les résultats suggèrent que la présence d’enfants en bas âge n’a pas d’impact significatif sur la probabilité d’une femme d’exercer un emploi autonome en Ouganda. À l’inverse, l’éducation a un effet causal négatif et significatif sur l’emploi autonome. Ce qui implique qu’une meilleure éducation accroît la probabilité pour une femme d’accéder à un emploi salarié sur le marché du travail. En termes de politiques, nos résultats impliquent que l’amélioration de l’éducation des filles est une politique plus efficace pour permettre aux femmes d’accéder à des emplois salariés queles politiques visant la réduction du nombre d’enfants.
This thesis consists of three essays, encompassing the fields of development and personnel economics, under the broad banner of applied economics. The first two essays of my thesis contribute to the literature of personnel economics by using multiples field experiments to provide empirical insights to the missing risk-incentives trade-off observed in contractual data. The third essay focuses on the causal effects of motherhood and education on female selfemployment in developing countries. In the first chapter, we investigate the internal and external robustness of risk-preference revealing experiments. We estimate the individual risk preference parameters using field experiments from a medium-sized tree-planting firm in British Columbia. We conducted riskrevealing experiments using the approach of Holt and Laury (2002) successively with low payoff lotteries (low-stakes treatment) and high payoff lotteries (high-stakes treatment). During the low-stakes treatment, workers could win between two 2 and 77 dollars. During the high-stakes treatment, workers could win between 4 and 154 dollars. We find that the aggregate distribution of risk preferences is stable across the two treatments but individual attitudes toward risk change across the low-stake treatment and the high-stake treatment. We explore the ability of the estimated risk preference parameters from the two treatments to predict workers choices between a piece-rate contract and a fixed-wage contract. The results show that the risk preferences measured from the high-stakes treatment predict effectively the contract choice decisions while the risk preference parameters measured from the low-stakes treatment are largely irrelevant. We argue that the increase in stakes led workers to take the lottery more seriously, hence the results from the high-stakes treatment are better measures of their true risk preferences. In the second chapter, we analyse the presence of risk perception bias among workers who are paid piece rates. A possible explanation for the lack of risk-incentives trade-off in observed contractual data is that workers have biased perceptions of the income risk that they face in contractual settings. For example, if workers underestimate the risk that is present, they will be willing to work in very risky settings for a reduced earnings premium. This would decrease the firm’s cost of implementing incentives in risky settings and would suppress the risk-incentives trade-off in observed contractual data. We investigate this issue using daily payroll data on the earnings of workers who are paid piece rates. We construct the actual distribution of earnings for individual workers in a tree-planting firm. We then elicit each worker’s perceived earnings distribution, using a questionnaire. We compare the perceived distribution to the actual distribution. Our results suggest that workers overestimate their average daily earnings and underestimate the standard deviation of their daily earnings and hence the earnings risk that they face. This under-estimation of the risk, increases workers’ likelihood of choosing piece rate contracts over the fixed wage contract. In the third chapter, we present new evidence on the impacts of motherhood and education on women’s self-employment probabilities, by accounting for the features of self-employment in a developing country context. Using micro-level data, we estimate the effects of motherhood and education on the self-employment probabilities of women in Uganda. Our estimation framework accounts for selection bias and the endogeneity of motherhood and education jointly, in both the self-employment and the labor force participation regression equations. Consistent estimators of the effects of motherhood and education are obtained by using a Full Information Maximum Likelihood Estimator’s method combined with a control function approach for endogenous regressors. We find no evidence of a causal effect of motherhood on women’s self-employment probabilities. In contrast, education has a negative causal effect on these probabilities. Both these results differ from the existing literature showing that motherhood, not education, drives women’s self-employment probabilities in developed countries. Our results suggest that these findings from the existing literature are not universal, as they do not obtain in the context of a developing economy, where self-employment is predominantly a feature of the insecure informal sector. In this specific context, public policies most effective at reducing the gender gap in pay are likely to be those that pull women out of self-employment, through better education and access to affordable childcare services.

We live in a world where resources are limited and how we invest them has an impact on the citizens’ wellbeing. The goal of this thesis is to provide, through the tools of economic analysis, some insights for the optimal allocation of our resources in three different areas: economics of crime, economics of education and economics of labour. First, societies aim at lowering crime rates and this is why a great amount of resources is spent in punishing offenders. How effective is punishment in lowering crime rates is still unclear: what are the forms of custody that deter lawbreakers from resuming their life of crime? Through a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we show that keeping young offenders separate from their older peers and far from an overcrowded environment is beneficial only when rehabilitation is offered. Second, empowering women and enhancing children’s early childhood development are two important objectives that are often pursued by independent policy initiatives in developing countries. Understanding the consequences of exploiting potentially beneficial complementarities in pursuing both aims together can be relevant. Through a quasi-natural experiment we evaluate a program implemented in Quito, Ecuador, that targets both. We find that women who are involved in the education of their children are empowered in different dimensions, as reflected in their higher likelihood to find full-time employment in the formalsector and in their greater independence in intra-household decision-making. Children’s dropout rates decrease, while school grades and scores on cognitive tests increase, particularly for girls. Finally, governments can introduce and raise minimum wage levels in order to protect their workers. We want to understand the implications of minimum wages on informal markets in developing countries. By exploiting relative variation in minimum wages across labour market groups within countries we show that a higher minimum wage is associated with a larger selfemployment share.

This thesis consists of three papers that belong to the broad realm of Applied Economics. The first chapter studies the causal connection between trade and development, using one of the earliest massive trade expansions in prehistory: the first systematic crossing of open seas in the Mediterranean during the time of the Phoenicians. For each point on the coast, we construct the ease with which other points can be reached by crossing open water. We show that an association between better connected locations and archaeological sites emerges during the Iron Age when sailors routinely crossed open water. We corroborate these findings at the world scale. In the second chapter, we use oil discoveries in the US South between 1900 and 1940 to analyse whether male-biased demand shocks reduce women’s labour force participation. We find that oil wealth has a zero net effect on female labour force participation due to two opposing channels. Oil discoveries raise male wages, which leads to an increased marriage rate of young women and thus could have depressed female labour supply. But oil wealth also increases demand for women in services, which counterbalances the marriage effect. Our findings demonstrate that when the nontradable sector is open to women, male-biased demand shocks in the tradable sector need not reduce female labour force participation. The third chapter analyses whether the German National Socialists used economic policies to reward their voters after coming to power in 1933. Using newly-collected data on public employment from the German censuses in 1925, 1933, and 1939 and addressing the potential endogeneity of the NSDAP vote share in 1933 by way of an instrumental variables strategy based on a similar party in Imperial Germany, I find that cities with higher NSDAP vote shares experienced a relative increase in public employment: for every additional percentage point in the vote share, the number of public employment jobs increased by around 2.5%.

The present thesis is made up by three separate chapters in applied microeconomics touching the realms of labor, health and family economics. The first one considers individual genetic information to explore the interplay between genes and environmental factors in shaping individual labor outcomes. The second one looks at old age health and provide an estimate of the causal effect of retirement on a syndrome of health deficit accumulation known as frailty. The third one investigates and describes the role of preferences in the screening and matching process of child adoption with the use of a novel dataset.

Chapter 1. Migrant Perceptions and Extreme Right Voting. The Role of Historic Sea Trade. In this chapter, we examine the connection between political ideologies and migrant perception. We test the hypothesis that a negative perception of migrants influences individuals’ far-right political positioning. In order to address likely endogeneity issues, we rely on historical Genoese and Venetian trade routes to Africa between XI and XIV century. Having routes to Africa in the Middle Ages implied hosting slave communities, as well as communities of sailors who met Muslims in Islamic ports. Thus, it meant somehow being in contact with unalike people many years earlier than those who lived elsewhere. On this basis, we construct a set of measures related to the proximity of each individual’s municipality of residence to the nearest Medieval port, calculated on the ancient Roman road network. Our models account for personal controls as well as historical, geographical and socio-economic municipal characteristics. Results suggest that historical ports play a significant role by shaping migrant perception affecting political positioning. We also test the persistence of history on electoral outcomes at the municipality level, using data from the 2018 Italian national elections. The outcome supports the main individual-level findings.
Chapter 2. Employment protection legislation and household formation: evidence from Italy. While many studies have investigated the determinants of household formation and fertility of young adults, only a few focused on the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on these outcomes. In this paper, we study the differentiated impact of the EPL reduction associated to the Jobs Act in 2015 in Italy on the household formation and fertility intentions of young Italians in various districts. To do this, we use data from a survey conducted on a sample of 18-34 years old for the years 2012, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The identification strategy exploits local variation in the level of efficiency of courts, measured in terms of average duration of proceedings, to assess the existence of within country and across district heterogeneity of the reform impact. Indeed, firing costs used to be relatively larger in those districts characterized by a larger duration of labor trials. The Jobs Act, by reducing firing costs, and modifying the autonomy of judges, should have had a larger impact in districts with less efficient courts. According to our results, the reform seems to have indirectly levelled out the fertility and household formation intentions of young Italians living in districts with more and less efficient courts.
Chapter 3. The effects of the Affordable Care Act on time use. In that chapter, through the analysis of the American Time Use Surveys daily diary data, we study the impact of the Affordable Care Act on the time allocation of childless adults focusing on two key pillars of the Affordable Care Act: Medicaid expansion and Tax Premium Subsidies. We adopt a triple differences-in-differences approach that hinges on income eligibility thresholds and cross states variation in the time of implementation of these two pillars, to conclude that individuals newly eligible to Medicaid reduced their labour supply at the intensive margin, while potential beneficiaries of Tax Credit Premium Subsidies increased their labour supply at the extensive margin. In particular, our estimates suggest that people newly eligible to Medicaid may reduce long working hours and spend lesser time waiting to and receiving care. On top of that, they perform more household chores and management tasks, and also dedicate more time to caring for individuals from other households and volunteering. In contrast, potential beneficiaries of Tax Credit Premium Subsidies reduce their leisure time, on average. The rationales for these findings are discussed and our results are set in perspective of earlier studies.

Underlying this doctoral thesis is the growing importance of the study of the relationship between cause and effect. This relationship can relate to policies, events, actions and processes. The analysis of causal relationships has developed over many years and still remains a central issue today. Indeed, in economics, the measurement of a particular causal effect is often one of the objectives of empirical analyses. When researchers are unable to conduct a randomized controlled experiment, they must necessarily rely on the observation of non-experimental data, i.e. data from the real world, as is the case with sample surveys for example. A major problem in the use of this data arises from the fact that they are not derived from an experiment specifically designed for the purpose. Therefore, there may be variable factors whose effects are difficult to separate from the specific treatment effect. The group of statistical techniques which have been developed for the assessment of causal effects from non-experimental data is therefore a very important field of applied econometrics. In this dissertation, I will face the the relationship between cause and effect and several impact evaluation methods, presenting a collection of three applications of these techniques, adapted from three different works: “Price Matching and Platform Pricing”, presented at the First NetCIEx Workshop (EU Joint Research Centre - Ispra); “Roads to Innovation: Evidence from Italy”, presented at the First NetCIEx Workshop (EU Joint Research Centre - Ispra); “Public Funded R&D as a Device for Local Innovation? Evidence from Italian I.I.T. Foundation”. In the first paper, the effects of Price Matching Guarantees (a PMG refers to the price strategy where different retailers commit themselves to match any lower price offered by competitors on the same item or product category) on U.S. online consumer electronics prices are empirically investigated, by means of a unique dataset developed through sophisticated and computerized scraping procedures. In such paper, joint use of daily price data, product characteristics derived from User Generated Contents (UGC) and the construction of a control group with a novel approach allow to implement a Difference-in-Difference analysis, aimed to assert the existence of a causal effect of PMG on prices. The paper finds evidence in favor of price reductions occurring after the PMG policy is repealed. The analysis further investigates if such effect is heterogeneous according to products characteristics, by exploiting UGC (products popularity and quality) and online search visibility measures (Google Search Rank). Estimates suggest that for high quality (visibility) products PMG policies harms competition by keeping prices high, while for low quality (visibility) products, prices decrease during the policy validity period. The second article deals on the literature on the economic impact of transport infrastructure, and in particular on the role that road infrastructure can have on innovative regional capacity. The seminal contribution by Agrawal et al. (2017) is followed to estimate a model of "roads and innovation" where the innovative activity in 1988 is linked to the length of motorways system in 1983, in order to investigate the impact of motorways endowment on the innovative capacity in each Italian NUTS-3 region. The main challenging issue about the estimation of the model arises from the possible endogeneity of highways stock. To deal with this problem, the "historical instrumental variable" approach is followed, by using the length of the ancient Roman roads system dating back to 117 AD as an instrument for the length of current motorways. Overall, the Instrumental Variable estimates indicates that 1983 highways network has a positive and significant impact on 1988 innovative capacity. Moreover, the analysis find a declining role for highways over time. Furthermore, results suggest a spatial reorganization of economic activity rather than a pure net economic effect. The third paper concludes this dissertation. In such final analysis, the effects on the regional economy of a prominent Italian place-based policy, the institution of Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, IIT, is a scientific research centre established in 2003 that conduct scientific research in the public interest), are investigated by means of a novel identification strategy, the Synthetic Control Method (SCM). Such identification approach, unlike other counterfactual impact evaluation techniques, is based on the creation of an artificial control unit that not only follows the same pre-treatment trend as the treated unit, but even overlaps the same one. In particular, through the SCM approach, the innovative and economic development (measured by patents per capita, number of local inventors and per capita GDP) of the treated region, namely Genoa, is compared with a set of Italian NUTS-3 control regions with the aim to estimate the causal effect of the location of IIT in 2006. Estimates show significant effects of IIT presence on local patent activity, highly specialised human capital endowment in research and GDP per capita, suggesting the existence of local spillovers from public research.

This work includes the results of a broad research carried out during the PhD course in Economics at the University of Genova. The first part of this work consists of two articles that can be ascribed to the literature on the long and short run economic impact of infrastructure. In particular, the first article is devoted to investigate the long-term impact of the Roman road network on today’s propensity to export following a micro funded model by Duranton et al. (2014) that links roads to trade. The paper main result is that, controlling for possible determinants of propensity to trade and for the lenght and the location of Roman road system dating back to 117 A.D., the latter still influences today’s propensity to export of the Italian NUTS-2 regions. Moreover, we investigate two potential channels underlying this result that have been highlighted in the previous literature. In particular, results in this paper confirm the well supported hypothesis in the literature that Roman roads are correlated with today’s roads even though they were not established on the same route. However our paper does not lend support to the idea that Roman roads foster current trade by influencing social capital. The second article deals on the literature on the economic impact of transport infrastructure, and in particular on the role that road infrastructure can have on innovative regional capacity. We follow the seminal contribution by Agrawal et al. (2017) and we estimate a model of "roads and innovation" where the innovative activity in 1988 is linked to the length of motorways system in 1983, in order to investigate the impact of motorways endowment on the innovative capacity in each Italian NUTS-3 region. The main challenging issue about the estimation of our model arises from the possible endogeneity of highways stock. To deal with this problem, we follow the "historical instrumental variable" approach by using the length of the ancient Roman roads system dating back to 117 A.D. as an instrument for the length of current motorways. Overall, our Instrumental Variable estimates indicate that 1983 highways network has a positive and significant impact on 1988 innovative capacity. Moreover, we find a declining role for highways over time. Furthermore, results suggest a spatial reorganization of economic activity rather than a pure net economic effect. The second part of this work contains an article that belongs to the literature on the multidimensional indexes of well-being. In particular, following the growing interest in new and better measures of development, we elaborate an index of development for the Republics that gained independence after the Soviet Union broke up. We base our analysis on a set of variables from the World Development Indicators database released by theWorld Bank. We select the variables through principal component analysis and we calculate the index using factorial analysis. Therefore, following the well supported hypothesis in the literature that good governance has a key positive influence on development, we compare this index with a proposed index of governance, elaborating data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators database of the World Bank. As expected, the correlation between our index of development and our index of governance is high. Finally we perform a cluster analysis to group country according to the two indices.

Defence date: 29 January 2021
Examining Board: Professor Andrea Ichino (European University Insitute); Professor Matteo Cervellati (University of Bologna); Professor Dominik Sachs (University of Munich); Professor Roope Uusitalo (University of Helsinki)
This thesis consists of three articles in applied economics. In the first essay, I consider the extent to which informational frictions between workers and jobs can be alleviated with short-term contracts in the early career. I leverage a program at a Finnish university which gave out randomly selected students an internship subsidy for a three-month paid internship. I match these students to administrative data to track their transition to labor markets in the years around the program and find evidence that the program significantly improved early labor market success. In the second essay, I study the effect of social sorting on family formation and inequality across households. I leverage the institutional features of Finnish high-school assignments to evaluate how exposure to high- skilled, high-socioeconomic -status peers affect the quality of social ties individuals form. I find that while high schools are an important meeting place for future spouses, but that exposure to higher quality peers will not affect the eventual partner characteristics. This suggests that policies aiming to mix individuals from various backgrounds may not always work anticipated. In the third essay, I study with two co-authors the causes and consequences of broadly defined inequality and democratization using Finland as a natural experiment. We find evidence that the 19th famine affected inequality and labour coercion and thus the balance of political power. On the other hand, we find that these developments were critical in explaining both the increasing threat of revolution and participation in the Finnish civil war in the early 20th century and a subsequent shift to democratization. Areas that initially experienced higher growth in inequality, also experienced the most significant shift to redistribution in the aftermath of the war.
-- Part 1. Abstract -- Part 2. Internships and the Allocation of Talent -- Part 3. Social Sorting, Family Formation and Inequality -- Part 4. The Violent Origins of Finnish Equality

Defence date: 21 September 2021
Examining Board: Prof. Andrea Ichino, EUI, Supervisor, Prof. Giacomo Calzolari, EUI, Co-Supervisor, Prof. Stephen Machin, London School of Economics, Prof. Giulio Zanella, University of Bologna.
This thesis consists of four essays in applied microeconomics. Chapter 1 studies the effects of parental job loss on various outcomes of children and provides new evidence on the heterogeneity of these effects along the cognitive ability distribution of children. I find that higher intelligence score protects children from the negative effects, but only in the long run. In the shorter term, instead of protecting, high intelligence exacerbates the cost of parental unemployment in terms of educational outcomes. This forces high-intelligence children with unemployed parents to start their careers at lower-paying jobs. Nevertheless, they can prove themselves via work performance and switch to better-paying jobs. I also provide suggestive evidence that their lifetime earnings could be higher had they continued their education. Chapter 2, joint with Michele Boldrin and Aldo Rustichini, studies the relationship between fertility decisions and intelligence. We document that fertility may be negatively associated, at least in advanced societies, with higher intelligence. A possible explanation of the finding is provided in models describing the choice of individuals (in particular women) facing a trade-off between parenthood and career concerns. With positive complementarity between intelligence and effort in education and career advancement, higher intelligence individuals, particularly women, will sacrifice parenthood to education. Thus, current education and labor market policies may be imposing an uneven penalty on more talented women. We test and find support for the model in a large data set for the UK (Understanding Society), using several alternative measures of fertility. Our results provide a new interpretation of the well documented fact in demographic studies that education is negatively associated with fertility: it is not education as an outcome, but as an aspiration that reduces fertility. Chapter 3 investigates the joint effect of local economic conditions on educational decisions and subsequent labour market outcomes using the instrumental variable approach. I find that adverse economic conditions at age 14 reduce educational attainment, except for the children aiming at university degrees. Second, exposure to a higher unemployment rate at age 14 permanently reduces real hourly wages over the life cycle. The IV estimator suggests that a year of education lost due to initial economic conditions corresponds to about 8% lower wages at ages 26-30 and 6% lower wages at ages 41-45. Chapter 4, joint with Johanna Reuter, attempts to differentiate the degree attainment in the UK by type of higher education institutions. Historically higher education in the UK has been shaped by a dual system: elite universities on the one hand and polytechnics and other higher education institutions on the other. Despite the formal equivalence of both degrees, the two institution types faced different financing, target populations, admission procedures and subjects taught. Nevertheless, in survey data they are often indistinguishable. We overcome this problem using a multiple imputation technique in the UKHLS and BHPS datasets. We examine the validity of inference based on imputed values using Monte Carlo simulations. We also verify that the imputed values are consistent with university graduation rates computed using the universe of undergraduate students in the UK.
-- 1 Does intelligence shield children from the effects of parental unemployment? -- 2 Fertility Choice and Intelligence in Developed Countries -- 3 From bad to worse: long-term effects of recession in adolescence -- 4 Multiple Imputation of University Degree Attainment

This thesis investigates different social and political aspects of modern economies. The first chapter contributes to the natural resource curse debate, by showing that the impact of resource windfalls is different among democracies and autocracies. The results also point to the existence of a large heterogeneity in the response to resource shocks among autocracies. The second chapter focuses on metropolitan areas in the US, and deals with the issue of social capital formation. I examine one important aspect of social capital, trust, and argue that it is lower when income inequality between different racial groups in the metropolitan area is higher. The third chapter studies the relation between media influence and electoral voting in Italy. I relate electoral outcomes at the municipal level to differences in signal reception of Silvio Berlusconi's private TV network. The results show that greater exposure to commercial television increases support for Silvio Berlusconi's party.
Aquesta tesi investiga diferents aspectes socials i polítics de les economies modernes. El primer capítol versa sobre el debat a l'entorn dels recursos naturals, mostrant que l'impacte dels guanys imprevistos dels recursos és diferent entre democràcies i autocràcies. Els resultats també indiquen l'existència d'una àmplia heterogeneïtat entre autocràcies en la seva reacció davant a variacions dels recursos. El segon capítol se centra en les àrees metropolitanes dels EUA i tracta el tema de la formació de capital social. He examinat un aspecte important del capital social, la confiança, i, argumento que és baixa quan, en la mateixa zona metropolitana, hi ha una gran desigualtat en les rentes dels diferents grups racials. El tercer capítol estudia la relació entre la influència dels mitjans de comunicació i el vot electoral a Itàlia. He relacionat els resultats electorals a nivell municipal amb les diferències en la recepció del senyal dels canals privats de televisió de Silvio Berlusconi. El resultat mostra que una gran exposició a la televisió comercial incrementa el suport polític al partit de Berlusconi.

In this thesis I present three essays that explore various economic situations on strategic choices from different perspectives: the individuals’ strategic decision to work on the informal/formal sector, the US strategic decision on the provision of foreign aid, and the firm’s strategic decision to engage in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The first essay presents an analysis on the effect of income taxes and its effect on worker’s transitions towards informality. We find that an increase in average tax rate leads to a statistically significant increase in transitions towards informality for women and those with low incomes. The second essay offers evidence of how patterns of US foreign aid to Latin America differ from aid allocation observed elsewhere. We find that while political institutions and events in recipient countries greatly influence US aid allocations, the ideological orientation of US administrations can explain part of the divergent patters of aid towards Latin America. Finally, the third essay studies two possible mechanisms that affect the decision of a firm to engage in CSR: the role of growth in value added and workers’ preferences. The results suggest that firms engage in CSR in times of economic prosperity; peer effects are increasingly important in a firm’s decision to engage in CSR when the proportion of firms within an industry increases. And finally, I find a weak link between workers’ preferences and a firm’s decision to engage in CSR activities related with diversity.

This dissertation discusses three topics in applied economics. The first essay examines the causal effect of social capital on individual income by exploiting the historically determined pattern of family name distribution in Chinese villages. Family name distribution impacts social capital through historical inter-lineage rivalry and cooperation. The estimates show a strong first order effect on male villagers, which implies a one standard deviation increase in social capital is equivalent to two to four years of education. No effects on female villagers were found. The gender differentiation could be accounted for by occupation difference: male villagers' income mainly comes from market exchange, while female villagers' income comes mainly from home production. Using a simple model, it is demonstrated that a village's social capital determines its trade scope and therefore income of its residents. The second essay proposes a general method to identify subjective expectation bias. The method exploits an implication of rational expectations that requires the identical weight of an independent variable in projecting both objective and subjective probabilities. The empirical analysis shows that female seniors do not correctly internalize age information while male seniors fail at internalizing income information. Though cognitive ability and risk aversion can partially explain the results, they are not the sources of the identified biases. The third essay explores how seniors make long term care insurance (LTCI) decisions by developing a dynamic structural discrete choice model where a rational, risk averse, bequest motivated senior has to decide at each period whether to buy an insurance policy or not. Using the Health and Retirement Survey data, this essay finds substantial heterogeneity in bequest motive that drives LTCI decisions. Specially, the idiosyncratic bequest motive helps to explain why LTCI holders do not experience a higher incidence rate than non-holders.

This thesis presents four distinct essays that lie at the intersection of economics and computation. The first essay constructs an abstract framework for defining skills gaps, mismatches and shortages geometrically and thinking about these phenomena in a unified, formal way. It then develops a job matching model with imperfect information, in which skills mismatches influence the job application decisions of the workers, while skills gaps and shortages shape the competition for workers on the resulting bipartite job applications network. The tools proposed in this chapter could in future work be employed as the main ingredients of an agent-based model used to investigate how skills gaps, mismatches and shortages affect equilibrium outcomes. The second chapter designs and tests machine learning algorithms to classify 33 million UK online vacancy postings into STEM and non-STEM jobs based on the keywords collected from the vacancy descriptions and job titles. The goal is to investigate whether jobs in “non-STEM” occupations (e.g. Graphic Designers, Economists) also require and value STEM knowledge and skills (e.g. “Microsoft C#”, “Systems Engineering”), thereby contributing to the debate on whether or not the “STEM pipeline leakage” – the fact that less than half of STEM graduates in the UK work in STEM occupations - should be considered as highly problematic. Chapter 3 relates to empirical growth. It proposes a programming algorithm, called “iterative Fit and Filter” (iFF), that extracts trend growth as a sequence of medium/long term average growth rates, and applies it on a sample of over 150 countries. The paper then develops an econometric framework that relates the conditional probabilities of up and down-shifts in trend growth next year to the country's current characteristics, e.g. the growth environment, level of development, demographics, institutions, etc. Finally, Chapter 4 studies credit risk spillovers in financial networks by modelling default as a multi-stage disease with each credit-rating corresponding to a new infection phase. The paper derives analytical and proposes computer simulation-based indicators of systemic importance and vulnerability, then applies them in the context of the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007.
Includes bibliographical references.
This dissertation is composed of three chapters. The first demonstrates that natural gas violates many of the simplifying assumptions frequently used in modeling its behavior. Careful analysis of futures contracts written on gas suggests that gas prices are seasonal while returns are non-Gaussian and evidence stochastic volatility. In addition, examination of options prices indicates the intermittent presence of jumps. We find that models which disregard these properties struggle to recover options prices with any precision. Thus, we propose an alternative nonparametric approach to gas options pricing that captures these salient features while also shedding light on the nature of risk aversion embedded in gas markets. The second chapter offers a parametric approach to pricing derivatives written on natural gas futures designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing parametric schemes. First, it proposes a model of the underlying futures prices that admits stochastic volatility. Second, it makes use of a state-of-the-art Bayesian particle filtering technique to estimate the underlying process parameters along with a simulation-based technique for option pricing. While it trades off some performance relative to nonparametric approaches, such as the kernel scheme employed in the first chapter, the strategy employed is very general and allows for the pricing of more complex derivatives. The final chapter presents new estimates and approaches to estimating the home bias puzzle. It uses micro-level data to calculate households' foreign equity exposure as a function of wealth. We find simple estimates have significant errors-in-variables problems and we construct an estimator using grouping to account for this issue. Our estimates still imply low aggregate investment in foreign equity.
(cont) Finally, we disaggregate the investment decision by incorporating two step decisions that allow households to forgo participating in the market. As a result of the decoupling, we find foreign equity levels closer to that of standard portfolio theories.
by Erik Charles Ruben.
Ph.D.

Thesis advisor: Claudia Olivetti
Injuries and violence are a major public health issue and represent a threat to individual wellbeing, productivity, and societal development at large. In recent years, the public health approach to reduce violence and injury has become crucial in guiding research and public policy. Governmental and nongovernmental organizations are strengthening data collection and surveillance systems to promote research and inform policy making. Yet the idea that violence and injuries can be prevented through systematic monitoring and research is still a novel one. The three essays that comprise this dissertation make advancements in this direction focusing on the United States. The first two chapters focus on child safety, examining the issues of bullying and firearm violence at school. The third chapter expands on the topic of gun violence examining the impact of firearm legislation on the broader problem of suicide deaths. From a methodological point of view, this dissertation combines economic models with a public health approach employing both structural estimation techniques and a quasi-experimental approach. While quasi-experimental methods are effective in uncovering broad causal relationships between legislative changes and outcome measures, structural estimation methods are essential when interested in recovering deep preference parameters and performing counterfactual policy analysis. As such, this dissertation represents an example of multidisciplinary work combining Economics and Public Health, and highlights the importance of employing diverse methodologies to uncover crucial behavioral patterns and their policy implications. The first essay, titled Is School Bullying Contagious?, uses a nationwide cross-section of students to uncover peer effects in adolescent bullying behavior at school. Victimization at school has been linked to a number of adverse effects for child development and well-being, including depression, higher drop-out risk, and lower earnings during adulthood. While understanding social interactions in bullying behavior is essential to designing effective policies, previous empirical work has overlooked the impact of classmates’ behavior on the individual inclination for bullying. This essay estimates a structural model of bullying with social interactions where the individual bullying effort depends on the average effort among classmates. The model controls for individual and family characteristics, classmates’ characteristics, as well as classroom unobservable factors. The results present strong evidence of peer effects in a large number of bullying behaviors. Considering a median classroom of 20 students with five bullies, the introduction of a new bully would spawn two additional bullies due to peer influences. This suggests that social interactions can be targeted to reduce the prevalence of bullying. In particular, counter-factual policy experiments indicate that schools may achieve sizable reductions in the number of bullies by spreading them out over classrooms. The second essay, titled Gun Laws and School Safety, is joint with Summer Hawkins and Christopher Baum. Motivated by the documented link between school safety and psychological well-being, this essay examines the impact of state-level gun control on adolescent school safety. The analysis uses data on 926,639 adolescents from 45 states in the 1999-2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveys. Students self-reported on weapon carrying at school, the number of times they had been threatened or injured with a weapon at school, the number of school days missed due to feeling unsafe, and weapon carrying at any location. For each state and year, 133 gun laws were combined into an index of gun control strength. Difference-in-differences logistic regressions were used to evaluate the impact of stricter gun laws on binary measures of school safety. Each regression controlled for individual and state characteristics, as well as year and state fixed effects. An interquartile-range (IQR) increase in the index (i.e. a 15-point increase corresponding to a strengthening of gun control) was associated with a 0.8 percentage point decrease in the probability of weapon threats at school (p=0.038) and a 1.2 percentage point decrease in the probability of missing school due to feeling unsafe (p=0.004). While we did not find a significant impact of gun laws on weapon carrying at school, an IQR increase in the index was associated with a 2-percentage point decrease in the probability of carrying weapons at any location (p=0.002). Our results suggest that the adoption of stricter state gun laws may improve school climate and subjective perceptions of safety. The third essay, joint with Summer Hawkins and Christopher Baum, is titled Gun Laws and Firearm Suicides. Between 2005 and 2015, suicide rates have been steadily increasing in the US, with firearm suicides representing over half of all suicides and the primary cause of firearm mortality. As such, firearm suicides represent an urgent policy matter and a prompt policy response is required. Using a 10-year-long panel of the 50 states, we investigated whether stricter gun laws may reduce firearm suicides, possibly by reducing firearm availability. As a reduction in firearm availability may simply result in a substitution towards alternative suicide methods, we further explored whether stricter gun laws are associated with an increase in non-firearm suicides. We analyzed 2005-2015 National Vital Statistics System mortality files from the 50 states, with 212,804 firearm suicides and 206,795 non-firearm suicides. We measured the strength of state-level gun control using an index that combines 133 different laws. We conducted difference-in-differences regression models to assess whether changes in the index were associated with changes in the number of firearm and non-firearm suicides. We found that implementing an additional gun law would result in a decrease in the number of firearm-related suicides by 2 to 4 percentage points. In addition, significant interactions between the gun score and demographic characteristics suggest that the effectiveness of stronger gun laws is the highest among individuals age 20 to 49, but seems to be null among black individuals. Although we found no overall association between a stricter gun law environment and non-firearm suicides, stricter gun laws seem to increase non-firearm suicides among white and black individuals, suggesting that additional policy actions are required to prevent suicides in these groups. Our findings are robust to controlling for demographic characteristics, state time-varying characteristics, state and year fixed effects, as well as state-specific time trends. We also provide graphical evidence that trends in suicide rates were not dependent on the level of strength of gun control, supporting the parallel trend assumption and a causal interpretation of our estimates
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018
Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics

The thesis is composed of four chapters, which investigate different topics in the field of applied urban and spatial economics. The first paper develops an original empirical approach to investigate the role played by labour markets in explaining the pattern of industrial agglomeration in the United States. The methodology allows us to i) obtain an estimate of industrial agglomeration which significantly improves on existing indices, and ii) provide a ranking of industries according to their responsiveness to labour market determinants of agglomeration. Results show that labour market determinants explain around one quarter of the variation in spatial agglomeration across industries. The second paper assesses whether urbanization alleviates rural poverty in surrounding areas in India, using a panel dataset at district level for the period 1981-1999. We find that the effect is substantial and systematic; this is largely attributable to positive spillovers from urbanisation, rather than to the movement of the rural poor to urban areas per se. The third paper investigates an extremely peculiar characteristic of the US patent dataset: there is a large group of inventors who develop one or a few patents during a long period of analysis ("comets"), while a very small group of "stars" inventors develop a huge number of patents. In light of that, the paper first explores the location pattern of comets and stars, and then assesses whether the activity of star inventors is beneficial to the production of comet patents in the same city and technological category. The fourth paper describes the effects of bank liberalization on the geographical penetration of branches in the city of Antwerp (BE). Our results show that, coinciding with the strongest wave of the deregulation and concentration process, banks systematically exit from low income neighbourhoods.

This thesis addresses two important topics in environmental and resource economics: social discount rates for the far-distant future and biodiversity conservation and deforestation. In Part 1 social discount rates which decline with time horizon (Declining Discount Rates or DDRs), and their importance for analysing long term projects are discussed. Chapter 1 summarises the recent theoretical and applied literature and highlights some remaining gaps which are the focus of chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 solves a puzzle concerning one of the rationales for DDRs set by Gollier 2004a and provides some simple rules for incorporating intergenerational equity into Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA). Chapter 3 discusses the empirical issues surrounding determining a usable schedule of DDRs for CBA. The importance of time series model selection for the interest rate is highlighted. In Part 2 I focus in international agreements for biodiversity conservation and national policies for reforestation. Chapter 4 models global biodiversity conservation as a North-South bargaining game and shows that current international agreements may provide perverse strategic incentives in their attempt to solve this game and distribute the surplus. One conclusion of this analysis is that the incremental cost compensation for land use changes in the biodiverse south, offered by the Global Environment Facility under the Convention on Biodiversity, may not be sufficient to preclude strategic behaviour and further losses of biodiversity. Following on from this, chapter 5 looks at the household level impact of another important land use compensation policy: the Sloping Lands Conversion Programme (SLCP) of the Peoples Republic of China. We use programme evaluation methods to gauge the impact of the temporary compensation packages offered to participants in the SLCP on the level and source of rural household income, income distribution and poverty alleviation. This allows an analysis of the sustainability of this programme in reaching its objectives.

This dissertation is composed of three self-contained papers addressing specific research quest ions in distinct topics in applied labor economics. The first paper is joint work with my advisors. It makes a methodological point on the estimation of matching functions and shows its quantitative importance with an application to the United States (US) labor market. The second paper is joint work with two fellow doctoral students at the University of Bristol. It develops and estimates a search and matching model of the labor market to replicate stylized facts pertaining to racial discrimination in the US labor market. The third paper is sole-authored. It documents new facts concerning the role of part-time jobs in the macroeconomic employment adjustment in the United Kindgom's labor market during the Great Recession.

This thesis contains three studies in financial economics. The first study explores the relationship between CEO compensation, bank performance and risk taking in European banks using a panel data set of 63 banks in 15 countries during 1992 to 2010. The major finding is a positive relationship between performance and compensation, but also a negative relationship between short time incentive and risk. We argue that such relationship is not causative, and bonus may not induce risk taking. The second study examines the efficient market hypothesis and forward premium puzzle using high frequency daily data from 31 countries including both developed and emerging economies during 1990 to 2013. The study provides evidence covers 9 different time horizons of forward exchange rates. We show that the predictive power of forward rates decreases in longer time horizons in a way that similar to the term structure of interest rate. The third study investigates whether financial liberalization plays a role in explaining the current crisis. Our sample consists of 12 developed countries for the period 2000 to 2013. Our results support that financial liberalization contributes to crisis, and suggest that reregulation is needed after deregulation.

Cette thèse s’appuie sur des travaux économétriques et l’emploi de données originales. Elle se concentre autour de trois thématiques : l’économie des catastrophes naturelles, les relations entre les prix du pétrole brut et des carburants, et l’effet des stages sur l’employabilité, les salaires et la satisfaction au travail
This thesis is based on works in econometrics and the use of original data. It focuses on three themes : the economics of natural disasters, the relationship between the price of crude oil and the price of gasoline, and the effects of internships on employability, wages and satisfaction at work

This thesis consists of three chapters that fall under the broad banner of applied microeconomics. The first chapter analyses the role of the 2008 amendment to the USA Lacey Act in combatting international trade in illegal timber. Comparing US timber imports over time and across countries and products, I show that the US timber imports fell after the introduction of the Lacey Act. I find the fall in timber imports is accompanied by a fall in illegal trade as measured by the difference between importer and exporter reported statistics. Finally, using the case of Indonesia, I provide suggestive evidence in favor of a reduction in deforestation as a result of the policy. The second chapter analyzes the effect of a year long rolling blackout in Colombia on mothers’ short and long run fertility behavior and socioeconomic outcomes. We use an extensive period of power rationing in Colombia throughout 1992 as a natural experiment and exploit exogenous spatial variation in the intensity of power rationing as an instrumental variable. We show that power rationing induced a “mini baby boom” nine months later. In particular, it increased the probability that a mother had a baby by five percent. Women who were exposed to the shock and had an additional child find themselves in worse socio-economic conditions more than a decade later. The third chapter documents the way in which the types of people who are admired has changed, arguing that the responses to this question tells us something about the way in which society has been evolving - the 65 years of data are probably the longest consistent series on social attitudes. We present robust correlations between admiration and trust, allowing us to provide information on trends in trust on a consistent basis back to the late 1940s, earlier than most other data sources.

This thesis comprises three essays. The first one focuses on the effect of a change in the labour market conditions induced by a trade shock on crime at the US local level. Using US Census data, I provide evidence that the increasing exposure to Chinese competitiveness has indirectly contributed to the change in the propensity to commit crime through a reduction of the expected labour market earnings. The second essay, which is co-authored with Vincenzo Bove and Roberto Nisticó, addresses the reasons why countries decide to transfer weapons only to specific recipients. We present novel empirical models of the arms trade and concentrate on the role of energy dependence, in particular of oil, in explaining the trade of weapons between countries. We find strong empirical support for the hypothesis that oil-dependent economies have incentives to provide security by selling or giving away arms to oil-rich countries and reduce their risk of political instability. Finally, the last essay, joint with Emanuele Ciani, has a specific focus on family economics. We provide evidence that parents who helped their adult children in the past are rewarded by higher chances of receiving informal care later in life. To this purpose we use Italian data containing retrospective information about help with housing received from parents at the time of marriage. We show a positive association with their current provision of informal care to them, which is robust to controlling for a large set of individual and family characteristics, and is confirmed by an IV regression using house prices as instrument. The results are in line with theories based on the presence of a third generation of grandchildren, such as those involving a demonstration effect or a family constitution.

Cette thèse porte sur plusieurs questions relatives à l'économie de l'éducation et à l'économie des équipes. Dans le premier chapitre, basé sur une collaboration avec Laurent Rossignol, nous nous concentrons sur l'orientation scolaire. Nous mettons en évidence l'existence de biais d'orientation dans le système éducatif français : l'orientation des élèves ne dépend pas uniquement de leur performance académique mais aussi de leur sexe et de leur origine sociale. Notre contribution principale est de distinguer l'impact des aspirations des élèves de l'impact de la notation des professeurs et de leurs recommandations sur ces biais d'orientation. Le second chapitre, coécrit avec Antoine Chapsal, vise à comprendre certaines incitations et effets psychologiques associés au travail en équipe, à partir de données sur les championnats par équipe de squash. Nous montrons que les joueurs valorisent le fait de participer au succès de leur équipe, ce qui explique en partie pourquoi les incitations à l'effort sont plus fortes dans des contextes collectifs que dans des contextes individuels. Le troisième chapitre, issu d'un travail initial avec Rodrigo Lopez-Kolkovsky, a pour but de développer une procédure d'estimation pour mesurer la productivité individuelle en équipe, à partir de données sur le football européen. Nous confrontons ensuite cette mesure à la valeur de marché des joueurs et nous montrons que les joueurs Noirs sont discriminés sur le marché
In this dissertation, I investigate several questions of interest in the fields of economics of education and economics of teams. In the first chapter, based on initial work with Laurent Rossignol, we focus on tracking in education. We provide evidence of tracking gaps in the French education system: tracking does not solely depend on academic performance but also on gender and socio-economic status. Our main contribution is to disentangle the impact of differences in students' aspirations from the impact of teachers' grading and track recommendations on these tracking gaps. The second chapter, joint with Antoine Chapsal, aims at understanding some of the incentives and psychological effects associated to teamwork, based on team squash data. We show that players value the fact of being responsible for the success of their team, which partly explains that team-based contests can yield higher effort than individual-based contests. The third chapter, built upon initial work with Rodrigo Lopez-Kolkovsky, aims at developing an estimation procedure to measure individual productivity in teams, based on European football data. We confront this measure to players' market value and provide evidence for racial discrimination on the football market

The papers included in this thesis deal with a few aspects of insurance economics that have seldom been dealt with in the applied literature. In the first paper I apply for the first time the tools of the economics of crime to study the determinants of frauds, using data on Italian provinces. The contributions to the literature are manifold: -The price of insuring has a positive correlation with the propensity to defraud -Social norms constraint fraudulent behavior, but their strength is curtailed in economic downturns -I apply a simple extension of the Random Coefficient model, which allows for the presence of time invariant covariates and asymmetries in the impact of the regressors. The second paper assesses how the evolution of macro prudential regulation of insurance companies has been reflected in their equity price. I employ a standard event study methodology, deriving the definition of the “control” and “treatment” groups from what is implied by the regulatory framework. The main results are: -Markets care about the evolution of the legislation. Their perception has shifted from a first positive assessment of a possible implicit “too big to fail” subsidy to a more negative one related to its cost in terms of stricter capital requirement -The size of this phenomenon is positively related to leverage, size and on the geographical location of the insurance companies The third paper introduces a novel methodology to forecast non-life insurance premiums and profitability as function of macroeconomic variables, using the simultaneous equation framework traditionally employed macroeconometric models and a simple theoretical model of insurance pricing to derive a long term relationship between premiums, claims expenses and short term rates. The model is shown to provide a better forecast of premiums and profitability compared with the single equation specifications commonly used in applied analysis.

This thesis consists of three empirical papers on various topics, which are brought together under a broad umbrella of Applied Public Economics. The first paper uncovers causal links between cocaine seizures and cocaine-related hospital admissions in Italian provinces by resorting to instrumental variables approach. and explores spatial interrelations between the variables of interest via the SLX model. According to the results, ignoring endogeneity leads to underestimating the effect of seizures on consumption, while spatial relations between seizures in key entry points and consumption in the rest of the country and between seizures in adjacent provinces and consumption in a home province are found to be significant. The second paper exploits a fertility-incentivizing reform that took place in Russia in 2007 to study its effects on eligible households’ consumption expenditure patterns, treating becoming eligible for the assistance as a positive wealth shock; therefore, the paper is testing several theoretical predictions of the wealth effects literature in a setting of a developing country. Results indicate the presence of liquidity constraints, as well as households consuming from wealth to smoothen consumption trajectories. The third paper investigates causal links between problem drinking and depression by adopting a dynamic bivariate probit model, using Russian individual-level panel data. According to the results, there is evidence of bidirectional causality between the two variables, although there are significant differences along the gender dimension: the impact of depression on alcohol abuse is present only in the female subpopulation. In addition, state dependence of alcohol abuse is higher among males. The study also provides estimates of potential effects of alcohol prices doubling on both depression and alcohol abuse: male alcohol abusers are found to be price-insensitive, whereas depression prevalence among females would decrease as a result of higher alcohol prices due to a lower probability of alcohol abuse.

Il Capitolo 1 focalizza l'attenzione sui problemi di "reporting bias" legati all'indicatore di salute auto-riportato. Questo capitolo mostra che in Europa differenze di genere e differenze regionali possono solo parzialmente essere spiegate dalle differenze nella prevalenza delle varie condizioni croniche. Eppure, una parte non trascurabile di queste differenze è dovuta ad altre cause, che possono includere differenze nel modo in cui lo stato di salute viene riportato. Lo strumento delle "anchoring vignettes" è utilizzato per comprendere se e come le donne e gli uomini che vivono in diverse regioni d'Europa riportano differentemente il livello di salute relativo a vari "domini". L'analisi è basata sulla seconda Release della prima (2004) wave della Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). Questa indagine è ideale per lo scopo in quanto contiene informazioni circa misure soggettive dello stato di salute e misure più oggettive (come ospedalizzazione e "grip strength"), come anche informazioni dettagliate circa condizioni croniche. La seconda Release dei dati contiene anche l'uso di "vignettes" in questionari assegnati ad un campione casuale di rispondenti. Le "vignettes" risultano essere utili per identificare differenze regionali e di genere nelle "response scales". Dopo aver corretto queste differenze, le variazioni regionali e di genere nelle stato di salute riportato risultano entrambe ridotte, seppure non del tutto eliminate. I risultati suggeriscono che le differenze nelle "response styles" devono essere prese in considerazione quando si utilizza lo salute auto-riportato in studi socio-economici. Non tenerne conto pu\`o condurre a risultati fuorvianti. Focalizzando l'attenzione su una specifica condizione cronica, l'ipertensione, il Capitolo 2 studia la relazione tra compliance medica e outcome sanitari (ospedalizzazione e mortalità) utilizzando un panel di pazienti che risiedono in un'Autorità Sanitaria Locale italiana. Questi dati consentono di seguire i pazienti attraverso tutti i loro accessi ai servizi sanitari pubblici. I risultati mostrano che gli outcome sanitari migliorano decisamente quando i pazienti sono più "compliant" alla terapia. Inoltre, è possibile inferire importanti informazioni circa il ruolo che il co-payment ha sulla compliance, e di conseguenza sugli outcome sanitari, esplorando due esperimenti naturali verificatisi durante il periodo qui analizzato. I risultati mostrano che il co-payment ha forti effetti sulla compliance, e che questi effetti sono immediati. Il Capitolo 3 estende l'analisi della relazione tra salute e trattamento sanitario fornita nel Capitolo 2. Infatti, considerando la semplice correlazione tra salute e trattamento sanitario non necessariamente fornisce la risposta adeguata, a causa della simultaneità nelle componenti inosservate del deterioramento della salute. In questo capitolo, si utilizza un dataset in cui informazioni molto dettagliate circa il consumo farmaceutico, l'ospedalizzazione e la mortalità sono collezionate nel tempo per un campione di individui affetti da ipertensione. L'ipertensione è una condizione cronica e asintomatica di cui soffre una larga parte della popolazione adulta. Tutte queste variabili sono fortemente dipendenti l'una dall'altra. Per analizzare l'informazione contenuta in tali variabili, viene proposto l'impiego di un modello a fattori dinamico, in cui il trattamento medico e la mortalità siano in principio tutti guidati dallo stato di salute latente. La dinamica viene introdotta nel modello includendo l'effetto del trattamento medico passato sullo stato di salute corrente. Il modello è stimato tramite Massima Verosimiglianza Simulata. Coerentemente con i risultati presenti finora in letteratura, i risultati indicano che una migliore condizione di salute è associata con un minore trattamento medico. Inoltre, il consumo farmaceutico nel periodo precedente ha effetti positivi sullo stato di salute corrente. Questo è consistente con il fatto che non seguire la terapia medica oggi può risultare in una peggiore condizione di salute domani. Nonostante questo, assumere più pastiglie di quanto necessario non migliora ulteriormente la stato di salute. Questi risultati hanno importanti implicazioni in termini di policy. Infatti, i risultati suggeriscono che politiche mirate ad aumentare la consapevolezza delle malattie legate all'ipertensione e l'importanza della cura dell'alta pressione possono aiutare non poco a ridurre i rischi cardiovascolari, e la conseguente ospedalizzazione e mortalità. Ci si attende che questo abbia implicazioni positive sia per la larga parte di popolazione adulta affetta da ipertensione sia per gli stessi Servizi Sanitari Nazionali.
Chapter 1 focuses on the issue of reporting bias in self-rated health. This chapter shows that gender and regional differences in self-rated health in Europe are only partly explained by differences in the prevalence of the various chronic conditions. However, a non-negligible part of these differences is due to other causes, which may include differences in reporting own health. The tool of "anchoring vignettes" is employed to understand whether and how women and men living in different regions differently report levels in a number of health components or domains. The analysis is based on Release~2 of the first (2004) wave of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). This survey is ideal for the purpose because it contains information on subjective measures of health (such as self-rated health) and more objective measures (such as hospitalization and interviewer-measured grip strength), as well as detailed information on chronic health conditions. Release 2 of the data also includes the use of vignettes in self-administered questionnaires given to a randomly selected subsample of respondents. Vignettes are found to help identifying gender and regional differences in response scales. After correcting for these differences, both gender and regional variation in reported health is substantially reduced, although not entirely eliminated. The results suggest that differences in response styles should be taken into account when using self-assessment of health in socio-economic studies. Failing to do so may lead to misleading conclusions. Focusing on a specific chronic condition, hypertension, Chapter 2 studies the relationship between medical compliance and health outcomes (hospitalization and mortality rates) using a large panel of patients residing in a local health authority in Italy. These data allow to follow individual patients through all their accesses to public health care services until they either die or leave the local health authority. The results show that health outcomes clearly improve when patients become more compliant to drug therapy. At the same time, it is possible to infer valuable information on the role that drug co-payment can have on compliance, and as a consequence on health outcomes, by exploiting the presence of two natural experiments during the period of analysis. The results show that drug co-payment has a strong effect on compliance, and that this effect is immediate. Chapter 3 improves the analysis of the relationship between health and medical care provided in Chapter 2. In fact, looking at the raw correlation between medical care and health cannot be expected to give the right answer, because of simultaneity through the unobservable components of deterioration. In this chapter, it is used a dataset where very detailed information about medical drug use, hospitalization, and mortality, is collected over time for a sample of individuals suffering from hypertension, a chronic asymptomatic pathology affecting a large share of the adult population. All those variables are expected to be strongly dependent on each other. For analysing the amount of information embedded in such variables, a dynamic factor model is proposed, where medical treatments and mortality may all in principle be driven by latent individual stock of health. Dynamics is introduced by including the effects of lagged treatment on latent health. The model is estimated by Maximum Simulated Likelihood (MSL). In line with findings provided so far in the literature, the results indicate that better health is associated to lower medical treatments. In addition, lagged medical drug use is found to have positive effects on current health. This is consistent with the fact that not taking the medication today may result in poorer health tomorrow. Nonetheless, taking more pills than needed cannot improve health. These findings have important policy implications. In fact, the results suggest that policies aimed at improving awareness of hypertensive diseases and the importance of the treatment of high blood pressure may help reduce cardiovascular risks, and consequent hospitalization and mortality. This is expected to have positive implications both for the large share of adult population suffering from hypertension and for the National Health Systems themselves.

This thesis presents three chapters in applied welfare economics. What links all of them is that they point towards the individuals' well-being under different perspectives, and offer insights on potentially vulnerable groups of individuals that experience welfare losses and need improvement in policies to support them. The first and the second chapters provide a complementary analysis of the retirement role on individual well-being, which is observed firstly as individual subjective health status, and secondly, as subjective well-being, namely as an indicator of life satisfaction and an indicator of quality of life. The third chapter aims at analysing the association of energy poverty on the individuals' well-being, clearly it differs to the first two chapters in focus, methods and policy implications. The vulnerable groups we consider are energy poor and retirees. Energy poor are increasing in European countries and one of the main challenges is to be able to target them, given the multidimensional composition of the phenomenon. The growth of the elderly share in the population is an undeniable objective fact that brings out some concerns. In fact, it contribute to add financial burden to welfare states and worries to policymakers who aim at improving the financial stability of healthcare systems while preserving both the welfare and the well-being of older workers and retirees. The first chapter deals with the retirement impact on general, mental, and cognitive health. Retirement may worsen the individuals' health status when they experience, for instance, a reduction in intellectual or physical daily activities. At the same time, retirement might discourage investment in health by inducing negatively changes in health-related behaviours. Thus, it may affect health status by a direct effect, and by an indirect effect running through health-related behaviours. By using longitudinal SHARE data, and exploiting the mediation analysis in an instrumental variable framework, we built on a model for health and retirement to unpack this causal chain. We also model retirement as a two-stage process, namely, we consider both the status of being retired and the time spent into retirement. In the second chapter, we turn the attention to a broader definition of individual well-being, and we focus on the impact of retirement on life satisfaction and quality of life. The individual well-being consists of several domains, which people are able to separately or overall evaluate. As an example, exiting the labour market may be beneficial for well-being due to the increase in leisure time, but at the same time, it can be detrimental because of the drop in health status. Thus, retirement may impact subjective well-being in both a positive or negative way, and it is likely that the transition into retirement might adjust in time. By using longitudinal SHARE data, we model the relationship of retirement and well-being in an instrumental variable framework, which accounts for potential endogeneity arising for reverse causality of retirement and subjective well-being, and unobserved individual heterogeneity. In the third chapter, we investigate the relationship between energy poverty and life satisfaction. After constructing a multidimensional energy poverty index exploiting both subjective and objective indicators, we evaluate its effect on subjective well-being by using ITSILC cross-sectional data. By taking into account the ordinal nature of our variables of interest, we employ a bivariate order probit, to estimate the effect of energy poverty on well-being, and to investigate whether the welfare losses change for any severity level and life satisfaction. As both our main variables contain subjective information, we account for the endogeneity by imposing an exclusion restriction on the energy poverty determinants, namely the decades of the dwellings' construction.

The first essay of this dissertation explores the role of congressional politics in environmental law enforcements in the United States. It examines if and to what extent the political affiliation of a representative politician matters for the enforcement of the Clean Air Act (CAA); in particular whether the affiliation of a representative politician to a particular party results in a higher/lower level of enforcement in his/her constituency. The period of 1989 to 2005 is considered. The analysis shows that political processes at the local, state and federal level did matter for facility level enforcements. By and large, the Republican politicians tended to reduce facility level inspections compared to their Democrat counterparts and the magnitude of such reduction marginally increased with the seniority of the Republican politicians----a finding that has important policy implications. As a result the political affiliation of a politician emerges as a key instrument for environmental enforcement in the emissions equation.The second essay studies the potential issue of contagion in individual honesty (or, dishonesty). When an individual believes that peers are predominantly untruthful (or, truthful) in a given situation, is he/she more likely to be untruthful (or, truthful) in that situation in absence of monitoring, social sanction and reputation formation? The analysis employs an asymmetric information deception game patterned after Gneezy (2005) and reaches at the conclusion that individuals are heavily (partly) contagious when they believe that peers are predominantly dishonest (honest). The conclusion sheds some light on one of the many individual level root causes as to why the world is bipolar in the distribution of corruption (with most countries are either highly corrupt or highly honest).The third essay discusses the complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles usage and the construction of the network of roads in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. With the expansion of roads, communication between two destinations became smoother, faster and more convenient and in turn attracted more and more people to use motor vehicles as a medium of communication. We empirically investigate how the expansion of the network of roads resulted in the diffusion of motor vehicles. We plan to empirically explore the impact of the diffusion of motor vehicles usage on the expansion of the road network in our future work. The complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles and the expansion of roads in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century has important policy implications for today's developing countries that do not have a well constructed network of roads.

This dissertation contains three chapters. Each applies the tools of applied microeconomics to questions in labor economics, the economics of education, and social economics, respectively. In the first chapter, which is joint work with Amanda Pallais, we present the results of a series of field experiments in an online labor market designed to test whether workers referred to a firm by existing employees perform differently from their non-referred counterparts and, if so, why. We find that referred workers have higher performance and lower turnover than non-referred workers. We demonstrate a large role for selection: referred workers perform better and persist longer even at jobs to which they are not referred at a firm where their referrers do not work. Team production is also important: referred workers are much more productive when working with their own referrer than with someone else's referrer.
Economics

These three essays investigate three different cases where naïve good intentions – policy or econometric – actually lead to suboptimal policy or measurement outcomes.

In the first chapter, James Hilger and I investigate bias in the commercial passenger fishing vessel (CPFV) industry when a naïve researcher estimates willingness to pay estimates (WTP), derived from random utility models (RUM), in the context of vessel sellouts. Using incorrectly estimated WTP measures may lead to undervaluation of natural resources.

In the second essay, Richard Carson, Melissa Famulari, and I simulate a university with a benevolent higher level administrator who wants to keep per-student funding roughly the same, or same with adjustment for preferences, across the university in a CES-style fashion. If students also prefer to major in departments with high per-student funding, these two goals are in conflict and necessitate the higher-level administrator to lower per-student funding for popular departments. Using data from UCSD, we find that departments with large numbers of students are less expensive per degree, have higher modified student-to-faculty ratios, and graduate students sooner than other departments.

In the third essay, I investigate the transition from methyl tertiary-buthyl ether- (MTBE-) enhanced to ethanol-enhanced (E-10) fuel in the Northeastern United States. Using a complicated set of phase-ins and phase-outs, I use difference-in-difference estimation to show that ambient acetaldehyde pollution substantially increased in percentage terms because of E-10 -- although this is a small level increase, since the level of acetaldehyde is low in the area. Using a stylized calculation based on cancer risk still shows damages of this pollution are levels of magnitude lower than the billion dollar water pollution cleanup costs from MTBE additive.

Empirical and theoretical topics in applied microeconomics are discussed in this dissertation. The first essay identifies and measures managerial advantages from access to high-quality deals in venture capital investments. The underlying social network of Harvard Business School MBA venture capitalists and entrepreneurs is used to proxy availability of deal access. Random section assignment of HBS MBA graduates provides a key exogenous variation for identification. Being socially connected to peer venture capital firms and private equity seeking startups leads to more deal flow, larger asset under management and better performance in the inaugural funds of HBS-executive run venture capital firms. The second essay presents a two-stage model of competing ad auctions. Search engines attract users via Cournot-style competition. Meanwhile, each advertiser must pay a participation cost to use each ad platform. Advertiser entry strategies using symmetric Bayes-Nash equilibrium that lead to the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves outcome of the ad auctions are derived. Consistent with the model predictions, empirical evidence shows that multi-homing advertisers are larger than single-homing advertisers. Comparative statics on consumer choice parameters, quality, and user welfare are used to analyze the prospect of joining auctions to mitigate participation costs. The analysis provides conditions when such joins do and do not increase welfare. The third essay develops and computes a dynamic model of search in internet advertising. Micro-level browsing data from Microsoft's Bing.com (formerly known as Live.com) is used for structural estimations. The model predicts that users do not click on any ad with weak signals due to accumulating search cost and monotonicity of the value function. Rational search reveals a cascading pattern: the user clicks on a sufficiently high, highest-signal ad first, then moves on to the ad with the next highest conditionally expected probability of match once his assessment on the current ad degrades over time. The user exits when maximum assessment of likelihood of match over all ads is below a threshold value. The essay provides a novel approach to understanding rational herding behavior when product quality is only partially unraveled.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2010.
Includes abstract. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed May 19, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

The thesis is a collection of three self-contained essays. In the first chapter, I study the effects of the adoption of new agricultural technologies on structural transformation. I exploit the introduction of genetically engineered soybean seeds in Brazil to show that if the new agricultural technologies are strongly labor saving they promote industrial growth in even in an open economy. In the second chapter, I study the welfare gains of a tax reform that eliminated distortive turnover taxes in Brazil. I find that taking into account the sequential nature of production affects significantly the gains of the reform, that increase with the number of times firms exchange intermediate inputs. In the third chapter, I exploit the random assignment of teams to groups in the soccer’s UEFA Champions League to provide causal evidence that hosting a sports team boosts the visibility of a city among tourists. I find that being drawn into the same group leads to between 5 and 8 percent more passengers flying for the three months following the end of the group stage.
La tesi és una col.lecció de tres treballs de recerca independents. En el primer treball analitzo els efectes de noves tecnologies agrícoles sobre el canvi estructural d’una economia. Utilitzo la introducció de llavors de soja genèticament modificades a Brasil per ensenyar que quan les noves tecnologies agrícoles són “strongly labor saving”, promouen el creixement industrial també en economies obertes. En el segon treball, estudio una reforma que va eliminar una taxa distorsionadora a Brasil. Trobo que el fet de considerar processos productius seqüencials afecta significativament els beneficis de la reforma, i demostro que aquests beneficis augmenten quan les empreses intercanvien bens intermedis més sovint. En el tercer treball, utilitzo l’assignació casual dels equips de futbol als grups de la UEFA Champions League per ensenyar que tenir un equip esportiu a la pròpia ciutat estimula la visibilitat d’aquesta entre els turistes. Evidencio que les connexions aèries entre dues ciutats amb equips que hagin quedat en el mateix grup, porten entre un 5 i un 8 per cent més de passatgers durant els següents tres mesos després de la fi de la fase de grups de la Champions League.