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How The Eitc Affects The Labor Supply Of Single Women, Michael Sikivie

Economics Dissertations

This thesis estimates a structural model of the EITC and the labor supply of single female heads of household using panel data. I do this by treating labor supply as a choice over a discrete set of income and labor bundles and estimating a flexible utility function defined over those goods, while modeling the distribution of wage offers. This allows me to overcome major technical limitations in the EITC and labor supply literature. I consider how effects on earnings and labor supply vary across the wage distribution and predict the effects of alternative EITC policies. I find that the EITC …

Three Essays On The Role Of Student And Teacher Non-Cognitive And Cognitive Skills In Determining Student Success, Carycruz Bueno

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation's essays exploit longitudinal data sets to provide evidence on education economics topics of school choice, social-emotional learning curriculum, and teacher hiring.

Chapter 1 estimates the causal effect of full-time virtual school attendance on student outcomes. I use a longitudinal data set composed of individual-level information on all public-school students and teachers throughout Georgia from 2007 to 2016 and implement individual fixed effect and semi-parametric cell analysis to investigate how attending virtual schools influences student outcomes. I find that attending a virtual school leads to a reduction in English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies achievement test scores …

Willingness To Pay For Medicare In A Structural Model Of Retirement And Health Investment, Peyman Firouzi Naeim

Economics Dissertations

Raising the eligibility age for Medicare, the third largest program in the federal budget, could lead to a large reduction in the federal budget deficit; however, the effect of this change on the welfare and the health of the near-retirement population is unclear. Using Health and Retirement Study (HRS) dataset, I measure the effect of a change in Medicare eligibility age on the welfare of the elderly population by estimating a dynamic discrete choice model of health and retirement that endogenizes health investment decisions. The empirical model allows for tracking the health behavior, labor supply, and health status among the …

Essays On Competition, Susan Xu Tang

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation examines how competition shapes behaviors of governments and agents in different scenarios. Governments compete with each other to attract for mobile tax base. Agents and workers face competition to earn prizes and bonus. Competition is an effective way to incentivize proper behaviors. While in some cases, it causes inefficiency and social welfare loss. This dissertation studies environmental regulatory competition, tax competition, and tournament respectively.

The first essay explores the question of whether OECD countries engage in strategic environmental policymaking and use environmental policies to compete for the investment. I directly estimate countries’ strategic interaction, which is the causal …

Essays On Entrepreneurship And Public Policy, Alicia Plemmons

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters empirically analyzing how public policy affects firm behavior, with a particular emphasis on small, entrepreneurial firms.

The first chapter analyzes how occupational licensing affects firm entry and employment decisions. Occupational licensing is a government permission to work within a specific job classification. The costs to firms of paying to license employees can be a substantial consideration when firms are making location and hiring decisions. Using individual firm-level data I analyze how these costs affect firms by determining how differences in costs across state borders affect the likelihood of firms entering on a particular side …

Essays On Social Dilemmas: Incentives And Institutions, Anomitro Chatterjee

Economics Dissertations

The focus of this research is on social dilemmas; instances where individual incentives are not aligned to social welfare maximization. The three chapters of the dissertation examine methods to mitigate three different social dilemmas in environmental economics. The first chapter uses a laboratory experiment to test the relative efficacies of the probability and severity of sanctions in reducing socially suboptimal extraction from a common property resource. Keeping expected penalties constant, the paper tests whether probability or severity is a more powerful deterrent under four quota regimes governing resource utilization. The second chapter uses secondary data and quasi-experimental empirical techniques to …

Essays On Social Dilemmas In Networks, Prithvijit Mukherjee

Economics Dissertations

The focus of the research is to study mechanisms that can raise the total social welfare in social dilemmas in exogenous networks. The two chapters apply experimental and empirical designs based on an underlying theoretical model which studies the effect of network structure on the group and individual behavior in laboratory settings.

The first chapter studies the efficacy of two cost sharing rules in raising efficiency in a best shot public goods game. The two cost sharing rules align individual incentive with group efficiency. The first is a local cost sharing rule, where individuals who invest receive a transfer from …

Higher Education Policies And Students' Behavior, Nicholas Wright

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation examines the impact of need-based financing policies, performance standards, and public recognition on college students' outcomes over time. Each essay utilizes novel administrative student-level data from Jamaica and a quasi-experimental econometric design to identify the causal impact of these college-level interventions on students' behavior. The general objective of this work is to provide credible evidence that can help policymakers create more effective policies to improve student success. Designing an effective framework for financing higher education is a major issue facing policymakers in developed and developing countries. While we have a good understanding of how college financing options affect …

Essays On Migration, Energy Use, Emissions, And School Assignment, Cody Reinhardt

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation has two essays. The first studies migration patterns in the U.S. and the relationship between migration patterns and energy use and carbon emissions. It uses a two-city model of energy use and household migration to analyze emission implications from city level green policies. Per-household emissions are calculated for the largest 49 MSA’s in the U.S. and data on migration patterns used to assign substitute locations to migrating households. Results show large differences in net carbon emissions from migration, which has implications for a wide range of policies affecting migration decisions. The second essay studies how school quality is …

Essays On Medical Marijuana Laws, Health Insurance And Health Care Utilization, Pelin Ozluk

Economics Dissertations

National Health Expenditures Accounts estimates that U.S health care spending grew4.3 percent from the previous year to reach $3.3 trillion, or $10,338 per person in 2016. The overall share of gross domestic product (GDP) related to health care spending was 17.9 percent in 2016, up from 17.7 percent in 2015. Moreover, increased use of opioid prescriptions led to excessive use and abuse of these drugs, resulting in nationwide "opioid epidemic". This dissertation examines how different policy interventions contributed to the rise in health care utilization and prescribed opioids in U.S.

The first chapter examines how medical marijuana laws changed utilization …

Essays In Environmental And Energy Economics, Faraz Farhidi

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three separate chapters using theory, simulation, empirical techniques, and also an experiment to address several questions relating to utilizing fossil fuel-based energy and its consequences on environment and society.

My first essay, titled “Endogenous Population Growth in a Macro Environmental Model,” simulated, based on U.S. calibrated data, the effect of utilizing clean energy vs. fossil fuel energy on long-run economic growth and its impact on the total welfare of the society. I present a dynamic growth model that explicitly allows for the interaction between an economy and an environment. I allow for endogenous population growth, where …

Demand-Side Interventions To Promote Residential Energy Conservation, Florian Rundhammer

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays that evaluate the effectiveness of interventions promoting residential energy conservation. I study three programs that were implemented as natural field experiments by energy utilities in the United States. In the experiments, households were randomly assigned to a control group that was not exposed to the program or to treatment groups that participated in the program(s). The main objective of this research agenda is to generate insights that help design effective energy policy.

In the first chapter, I study a program that provided weekly emails containing information about a customer's natural gas expenditure to more …

Essays In Behavioral Labor And Welfare Economics, Aleksandr Alekseev

Economics Dissertations

In my dissertation, I study three questions in behavioral labor and welfare economics using experimental methods: what is the role of task difficulty on effort, how to measure ability and motivation in a more rigorous way, and what are the economic consequences of stochastic choice in a risk setting.

In the first chapter, I study the effect of task difficulty on workers’ effort and compare it to the effect of monetary rewards in a tightly controlled laboratory experiment. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort, and that this effect is quantitatively large when compared to the …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Education, Jarod T. Apperson

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises essays that exploit geographic data in an effort to provide new causal evidence on three topics facing education policy makers.

Chapter 1 investigates the consequences of domestic violence exposure. I show that episodes of domestic violence cause a short-term increase in absences, but I do not find evidence that the events increase or decrease the number of disciplinary infractions, conditional on attending school. In addition, I measure spillovers to peers using plausibly exogenous daily and annual variation in peer group composition. In contrast to earlier research, my spillover results suggest that neither peers’ behavior nor their test …

Essays On Public Health Insurance And Child Health, Makayla Palmer

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation evaluates how publicly subsidized insurance programs impact fertility decisions, maternity services, and the health of children. I focus on two types of subsidized insurance: Medicaid, which is fully subsidized, and non-Medicaid subsidized insurance (NMSI) plans, which are partially subsidized. The first two chapters uses variation from the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to evaluate how eligibility for subsidized insurance affects birth related outcomes. The first chapter examines changes to the birth rate and the second chapter evaluates prenatal care, maternal health behaviors, delivery procedures, and birth outcomes. The third chapter focuses on Medicaid and explores how a shift to …

Essays On Misreporting, The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, And Adult Health, Augustine Denteh

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation examines the causal impacts of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) on adult weight and nutrition outcomes using novel approaches to address nonrandom selection into the program and survey data quality issues. The overarching objective of this study is to provide credible estimates of the effects of SNAP to help policy makers and administrators engage in meaningful debates and prescribe nutrition assistance policies that promote the overall well-being of low-income Americans as well as mitigate any unintended consequences of the largest nutrition assistance program in the United States.

The first chapter proposes a model to estimate treatment effects …

Essays On The Impact Of Economic Conditions On Health, Jaesang Sung

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation has three essays analyzing the impact of economic conditions on risky behaviors and health outcomes. In the first essay, I estimate the effects of U.S. Metropolitan Statistical Area housing prices on a variety of health outcomes and risky health behaviors separately for homeowners and tenants. The constructed dataset consists of information on individuals from the 2002 - 2012 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System combined with homeownership data from the March Current Population Survey and housing prices from Freddie Mac. I estimate positive results for homeowners in terms of their health and negative results for tenants when housing prices …

Essays On The Economics Of Risky Health Behaviors, Qihua Qiu

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays studying the economics of risky health behaviors. Essay 1 estimates the effects of Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) restrictions on weight status among adolescents aged 14 to 17 in the U.S. The findings suggest that a night curfew significantly raises adolescents’ probability of being “overweight or obese” by 1.32 percentage points, corresponding to an increase in “overweight or obesity” rate of 4.8%. A night curfew combined with a passenger restriction increases this rate by 5.8%. Overall, I estimate that nearly 16% of the rise in “overweight or obesity” rate among teenagers aged 14 to 17 …

Essays On Behavior, Experimental Design, Health And The Environment, Josef Tracy

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three essays that empirically evaluate the effects of policy interventions that have been inspired by insights from behavioral economics. The essays apply experimental or quasi-experimental designs to environmental, health and labor issues, in field and laboratory settings. They analyze if these nudges are effective in market environments, and if they are likely to continue to have the impact as their popularity continues to grow. The first chapter analyzes policy banning pharmaceutical representatives from providing off-site meals to doctors. It examines the effect on the type of medications prescribed, pharmaceutical and overall medical spending, and self-reported health measures, …

Three Essays On Health And Education In Indonesia, Bondi Arifin

Economics Dissertations

Improvement in health, education, and reducing child labor are a widely accepted public policy in the developed as well as developing countries. This dissertation consists three essays that examines the impact of health and education policy in Indonesia. The first essay examines the impact of the existence of limited resource hospitals on medical care utilization and household health expenditures. Limited physical access to facility health care is a primary concern that contributes to high health risks and inadequate medical care in developing countries, primarily in poor areas. The Indonesian government built limited-resource hospitals in poor areas. Difference-in-differences and matching-difference-in-differences methodologies …

Public, Tax, And Health Policies And Institutional Performance, Antonios M. Koumpias

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation evaluates the effectiveness of public interventions in tax policy (such as a tax compliance campaign in Greece), the performance of public institutions that dictate land zoning (corruption of zoning officials in Greece and Spain) and public health (publicly-provided health insurance; namely, Medicaid). The common underlying theme of the dissertation is the public nature of the policies examines with an empirical emphasis. The ultimate goal of this research body is to provide credible policy solutions for the improvement of public administration.

Essays On Fiscal Policy And Tax Compliance, Oronde D. Small

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three essays that examine critical aspects of fiscal policy and explores important determinants of tax compliance in a developing country context. The first essay examines the fiscal response to changes in debt-to-GDP for a panel of developing countries. Our empirical strategy adopts a dynamic difference generalized methods of moments (DGMM) model with forward orthogonal deviation. We find a positive and significant response for the primary balance and ‘fiscal effort’ to changes in debt-to-GDP. For the fiscal components, we find a positive relationship between debt-to-GDP and general and tax revenues, and a negative relationship with primary spending. We …

Essays On Tax Avoidance, Monetary Policy And International Trade, Giulia Zilio

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three distinct essays on tax avoidance, monetary policy and international trade.

The first chapter focuses on profit shifting. Multinational enterprises (MNEs) manipulate the prices that they use for intracompany transactions (known as transfer prices) to shift profits to countries with more favorable tax treatments. I improve upon the current practice to estimating this elasticity by constructing a measure of the stringency with which countries enforce their anti-tax avoidance rules and take into account their incentive to enforce them. I report evidence showing that the failure to account for the enforcement of anti-tax avoidance rules and the …

Essays On The Environment And Development, Rhita Pinta Berliana Simorangkir

Economics Dissertations

Two essays in this dissertation explore how developing countries’ effort to improve development outcomes and to protect their forest areas affect deforestation.

The first chapter investigates the effect of a conditional cash transfers (CCT) program, a rapidly growing poverty alleviation program in developing countries, on deforestation. Although an increasing number of studies measure the effects of environmental programs on poverty, little empirical evidence exists about the effects of poverty programs on the environment. I estimated the effect of substantial and persistent income transfers to poor households in Indonesia on deforestation. To control for non-random selection of administrative areas receiving the …

Essays On The Economic Effect Of School Finance Policies, Jinsub Choi

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters empirically analyzing how households and state-local governments respond to economic incentives created by school finance policies.

The first chapter analyzes what effect school capital investments have on housing values and household location choice. If the benefit of school capital investments outweighs the potential increase in local taxes, it would create an incentive for households to move into communities with school capital investments so that school capital investments may increase housing values in the context of the Tiebout model. My research identifies an exogenous variation in school capital investments by exploiting the lottery allocation of …

Essays On Gender And Microfinance, Shagata Mukherjee

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays exploring the heterogeneity of gender differences in behavior across contrasting societies. Are women naturally wired to behave differently than men or is it the social context in which the gender roles operate that motivate their behavior? I study this question in the contexts of risk, trust, and trustworthiness, moral hazard and repayment behavior in microfinance. I use the approach of conducting controlled field experiments in neighboring matrilineal and patrilineal societies in rural India. The two societies differ in gender roles but are comparable otherwise. Understanding the societal and cultural factors that drive gender differences …

Essays On Public Spending In Education, Social Protection, And Infrastructure, Biplab Datta

Economics Dissertations

In this dissertation, I visit areas of government spending that are core to human development and economic growth, and have equity and efficiency considerations. In the first essay, I examine the relationship between education and air pollution. How pollution affects education is typically studied through the health aspects of pollution exposure, and its subsequent effects on academic performance. This essay proposes a financing channel of pollution’s impact on education outcome. School districts with better air quality are endowed with higher tax base, and can generate more resources. Panel fixed effect analysis for a group of metropolitan school districts in the …

Essays On Working From Home And Maternal Employment On Children's Well-Being, Kwan Lun Julian Kwok

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation contains three essays. They explore the potential policies that can help maternal employment and its heterogeneous effects on adolescent's risky health behaviors. The first essay examines the relationship between working from home and the time parents spend on childcare. This study uses data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) to investigate a potential solution to the side effects of maternal employment: working from home. Parents who work from home contribute significantly more time to child-care activities than parents working outside the home. Working from home offsets the reduction in total primary-child-care time associated with maternal and paternal …

Essays On The Effect Of Pollution And Weather On Behavior, Bo Liu

Economics Dissertations

Pollution, extreme weather, and global warming have become increasingly important in today’s society. This dissertation examines these topics in three chapters, analyzing the effects of pollution and environmental factors on human behavior.

The first chapter uses a dataset of unique daily crimes in the U.S. to unveil the relationship between weather/pollution and the crime rate for seven major U.S. cities. The results reveal that temperature significantly affects both violent and property crime rates. The rate of violent crime is lower on extreme and unpleasant weather days (i.e., when the temperature is above 99°F) in comparison to good or unremarkable days. …

Essays On Tax Efficiency, Sohani Fatehin

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation addresses questions on tax and efficiency. In particular, the main research question in essay one is: what is the impact of state and local taxes as well as expenditure policies on the level, growth, and ratio of high wage workers in U.S. In particular, this essay tries to identify whether interstate differences in state-local level fiscal policies are the main driving force to attract high wage workers or not. Based on Roback (1982) and Epple-Plat’s (1998) model, a theoretical model in presented in which the relationship appears as ambiguous. Empirically, current population survey (CPS) data is used to …