Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays On Academic Achievement And Student Behavior In Public Schools, Wael Soheil Moussa

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation examines the student academic achievement through various mechanisms, put in place by the public school district, classroom student behavior, and negative external shocks to the students' living environment. I examine the impacts of various treatments on student short and long run academic outcomes such as math and English test scores, grade retention, special education diagnoses, as well as high school graduation. Each essay will be presented as a chapter of the dissertation.

The first essay uses student-level administrative data from New York City Public Schools to examine the impacts of school entry age on student academic outcomes (including …

Essays On Agglomeration, Homeownership, And Labor Market Outcomes, Jie Dai

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on the labor market impact of agglomeration economies and that of homeownership. The empirical analyses use different U.S. data and econometric techniques to examine the impact on different labor market outcomes such as volatility of hours worked and men's employment.

The first essay is motivated by the labor market pooling model from Krugman (1991). The paper adds to a small but important literature that provides evidence on the microeconomic foundation of agglomeration economies. Using various years of data from the American Community Survey and the County Business Patterns survey, I show that the agglomeration …

Essays On Health And Medical Care, Yin-Fang Yen

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays that explain health outcomes and medical care in the United States. Health care has been a major concern of economists and policy makers. Policy intervention is one of the key factors that affect health outcomes, especially among low-income families. Welfare programs such as Medicaid and cash assistance are conventionally implemented to assist low-income families. The effectiveness of these efforts to improve health outcomes and medical utilization among low-income families is not entirely clear. As to the supply side of health care, the results of previous studies on how hospitals provide the services are mixed. …

The Effect Of Public Policy On Health Service Providers, Marier Allison

Economics - Dissertations

Chapter 1

Low-income, publicly insured admissions historically cost more to treat than the average patient. To ensure that hospitals are reimbursed an adequate amount for care of indigent populations, Medicare reimburses hospitals an additional percentage amount according to federally set financial schedule. The reimbursement cutoff is discrete: at fifteen percent of a disproportionate patient percentage, a hospital is reimbursed an extra 2.5 percent of the standard prospective payment rate. I extend a simple model of hospital quality as a function of insurance reimbursement increases to determine that under certain circumstances there exists a positive relationship between quality and reimbursement. I …

Essays On Agglomeration, Access To Medical Services, And The Real Estate Market, Jing Li

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three papers that study how external economies of scale help to explain geographic variation in access to medical services as well as potential implications on the real estate market. Specifically, the first two papers examine whether an increased concentration of the hospital service industry promotes productivity in treating patients and if so, what are the specific channels through which agglomeration economies might take place in the health care industry. The third paper explores how the productivity variation is reflected in the real estate market.

Chapter 2 examines two factors that help to explain geographic variation in health …

Three Essays On The Quality Of Marriage, Jose V. Gallegos

Economics - Dissertations

In these essays I focus on issues that affect the quality of marriage. First, I analyze the effect of the Chilean divorce law on a woman's decision of when to have the first child. Using survival analysis, I find that the divorce law has had a positive effect on the hazard for highly-educated women. This result suggests that highly-educated women may have waited to have the first child until they were able to afford the additional costs that a child may bring to a divorce process in case the couple decided to separate. In the second essay I analyze the …

The Essays On Unintended Consequences Of Public Policy, Andrew Ira Friedson

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation studies three examples of public policies having consequences other than those intended when the policy was passed. They demonstrate that due to the interconnectedness of the economy, the intended effect of a policy is rarely the sole effect.

The first essay examines the Texas Top 10% Plan. This policy guarantees automatic admission to their state university of choice for all high school seniors who graduate in the top 10% of their high school class. The essay shows evidence that households reacted strategically to this policy by moving to neighborhoods with lower-performing schools, increasing property values by 4.9 percent …

The Effects Of Infrastructure Development And Taxation On Current And Future Earnings, Mukta Mukherjee

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of three essays, each of which studies a policy in India that provides a unique circumstance affecting directly or indirectly earnings. The purpose of this work is to analyze how taxation and infrastructure development aspects the current and future earnings using these policies

In the first essay, I use a national infrastructure development program initiated in India in 2001 to construct new all-season roads (roads that can be used in all-weather especially monsoons) in villages that previously had only had dry-season roads (roads that are difficult to use in monsoons). In the second, I use …

Three Essays On The Property Value Impact Of Neighborhood Disamenities, Alexander Nicholas Bogin

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation employs hedonic analysis to examine market demand for three neighborhood disamenities. The first chapter investigates the property value impact of a No Child Left Behind "failing" school designation. The second chapter studies the property value impact of a local homicide. The third chapter examines the property value impact of proximity to a mosque post 9/11. Each disamenity has a negative and significant effect on property values with the magnitude of impact varying across household type.

Essays On Foreign Direct Investment, Agglomeration And Productivity, Fariha Kamal

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role of foreign direct investment and agglomeration economies in the process of industrial development, with a focus on the productivity of manufacturing firms. The first chapter analyzes the importance of the source of foreign direct investment on the performance of domestic Chinese firms. The second chapter studies the interaction between foreign and domestic manufacturing firms operating in the same industry and located within the same Chinese city. The third chapter examines the response of multinational companies to changes in domestic institutions. My findings highlight the importance of the source of foreign direct investment, proximity to economic …

Essays On Testing Hypotheses When Non-Stationarity Exists In Panel Data Models, Sang Gon Na

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on testing hypotheses in panel data models when non-stationarity exists in the model. This is done under the high-dimensional framework where both n (cross-section dimension) and T (time series dimension) are large. In the first essay, I discuss the limiting distribution of the t-statistic; using different panel data estimators and propose using the t-statistic based on Feasible GLS estimator. In the second essay, I develop the bootstrap F-statistic for cross-sectional independence in a panel data model with factor structure.

The first essay considers the problem of hypotheses testing in a simple panel data regression …