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Essays On Artefactual And Virtual Field Experiments In Choice Under Uncertainty, Ming Tsang

Economics Dissertations

In the area of transportation policy, congestion pricing has been used to alleviate traffic congestion in metropolitan areas. The focus of Chapter 1 is to examine drivers’ perceived risk of traffic delay as one determinant of reactions to congestion pricing. The experiment reported in this essay recruits commuters from the Atlanta and Orlando metropolitan areas to participate in a naturalistic experiment where they are asked to make repeated route decisions in a driving simulator. Chapter 1 examines belief formation and adjustments under an endogenous information environment where information about a route can be obtained only conditional on taking the route. …

Essays On Smoking, Drinking And Obesity: Evidence From A Randomized Experiment, Benjamin David Thomas Johannes Ukert

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters analyzing risky health behaviors utilizing data from the Lung Health Study (LHS), a randomized smoking cessation program. The first two chapters of this dissertation analyze the effects of smoking on alcohol consumption and BMI, respectively. The third chapter studies whether and how much the objective smoking information, which is defined by clinicians, may be misreported.

The first chapter examines the effect of smoking on alcoholic beverage consumption. The epidemiology literature suggests that both behaviors affect similar brain regions and are commonly consumed together. So far, the economics literature has presented inconclusive causal evidence on …

Three Essays On Family And Labor Economics, Fatma Romeh Mohamed Ali

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three distinct yet interrelated essays in family and labor Economics. In particular, I examine the impact of household demographic and socioeconomic characteristics on household decisions related to the investment in child human capital such as fertility, child health and child labor. The first chapter examines the impact of women’s education on household fertility decision. I use the change in the length of primary schooling in Egypt in 1988 to extract an exogenous variation in female education using a nonparametric regression discontinuity design. My analysis shows that female education significantly reduces the number of children born per …

Essays On Regional Amenities And Public Policies, Elena Andreyeva

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation investigates how alterations in government policies affect the level of, and access to, public amenities, and how outcomes vary across space. The first essay sheds light on whether the recentralization of political institutions in Russia affected the provision of regional public services. First, I exploit regional variation in governors’ party affiliation to assess the impact of a uniform change in political institutions towards more centralization on the level of public services provision across states. Second, I investigate whether the combined effect, recentralization and party affiliation, is different among local and global public services. I find that a change …

Three Essays On Social Issues In Experimental Economics, Daniel Lee

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays, all of which use the toolbox of experimental methods to explore behavioral issues that fall out of the concepts of human capital and public economics. The essays examine how an individual alters her behaviors in response to changes in price, information, and social pressures. Understanding these behavioral changes can help us to better explore the pathways that can then inform optimal policy design.

The first essay, Racial Bias and the Validity of the Implicit Association Test, examines Implicit Bias from an economic standpoint. Implicit associations and biases are carried without awareness of conscious direction. …

Incentive Compatible Payoff Mechanisms For General Risk Theories, Yi Li

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation focuses on one methodological problem in experimental economics: how to pay subjects, or in other words, payoff mechanism issue. For example, one popular payoff mechanism is Random Lottery Incentive System (RLIS), that is, after subjects have made all their choices, one among all their decisions is randomly selected as their payment. Payoff mechanism is part of the incentive in economic experiments, and people respond to incentives. When economists think they observe subjects' responses to experimental tasks, the observed behavior is actually the joint effect of the decision tasks and the payoff mechanism used in the experiment. When the …

Essays On Behavioral Economics In Climate Change Adaptation, Maria Nilda Bernedo Del Carpio

Economics Dissertations

Climate scientists have predicted an increase in weather variability in the last decades that will continue in the future. My dissertation focuses on understanding the behavioral factors that encourage household adaptation to climate change and testing the effectiveness of one popular policy recommendation taking into account behavioral factors.

Since climate change is fundamentally an intertemporal decision under risk, time and risk preferences will shape how individuals and groups adapt on their own and in response to public policies and programs. Applying recent developments in experimental designs and estimators, in my first chapter I conduct field experiments to characterize time and …

Essays On Policy Evaluation From An Environmental And A Regional Perspective, M. Taha Kasim

Economics Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays, which explore how public policies influence household and firm behavior, and the impact policies could have on environmental outcomes. The essays examine how households respond to price-based policies, the impact information disclosure policies could have on environmental outcomes, and finally the influence of normative appeals and non-pecuniary strategies on behavioral outcomes. Understanding these adjustments in the behavior of the agents is particularly important for policy design and for legislators who intend maximize societal benefit.

The first essay, titled Matchmaking Between Vehicle Miles Traveled and Fuel Economy: the Role of Gasoline Prices, studies a …