Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Estimating The Size Of The Shadow Economy In The Kingdom Of Saudi Arabia, Ali Alsubaie

Wayne State University Dissertations

The shadow economy (SE), as unreported economic activity, is a challenge for researchers and policymakers worldwide because of its size, consequences for economic development, and the difficulty of evaluating it. This dissertation makes an original contribution to SE research by estimating the size of the shadow economy in Saudi Arabia for the period 1975–2018.

This dissertation uses a modified version of the most widely used method currently available for SE estimation: the Currency Demand Approach (CDA). This approach focuses on identifying excess cash used in an economy not accounted for in the official statistics on the assumption that shadow activities …

The Relationship Between Conflict And Longevity: A Panel Data Analysis, Felicitas Adu-Acheampong

Wayne State University Dissertations

With a series of multivariate regression models this study investigates the association of conflict, health and non-health inputs with different facets of longevity in OECD, emerging and African countries. Using a country-level panel data set covering the period 1990 through 2014, five facets of longevity are examined: infant mortality, life expectancy for males at birth, life expectancy for females at birth, life expectancy for males at age 65, and life expectancy for females at age 65 among OECD and emerging countries. With country-level data spanning 1997 through 2016 from 50 African nations, production functions are also estimated for four distinct …

Statistical Analysis Of The Effect Of Work Conditions On Safety And Health In The U.S. Long-Haul Trucking Industry: Evidence From The Niosh Survey Data, Takahiko Kudo

Wayne State University Dissertations

Chapter 1 reviews the literature which analyzes the effect of compensation and work conditions on safety and health.

Chapter 2 analyzes how truck drivers’ compensation affects their safety performance, using moving violations as a proxy for safety. In addition to drivers’ pay per mile driven, we employ fringe benefits as independent variables. The result suggests that the rate of pay per mile driven, and employment-based health insurance, significantly decrease the probability of moving violations. The result provides support for the hypothesis that high compensation for drivers improve drivers’ safety performance, though other forms of compensation are not significantly related to …

The Demand And Supply Side Responses To Changes In Health Insurance Status, Naim Chy

Wayne State University Dissertations

We estimate the effects of having health insurance on the probability of facing trouble in accessing provider’s care and that of being refused as a new patient by the provider’s office in chapter 2 of this dissertation. The NHIS data for 2011-2015 are pooled. To fight the potential endogeneity problem arising from the selection bias associated with insurance status we use a 2SLS method with self-employment status of individual and family income as the instruments. The estimated results show that having health insurance reduces the probability of facing difficulty in getting provider’s appointment by 7.3 percentage points. On the other …

Health And Natural Capital In An Augmented Solow Growth Model, Sa-Ad Iddrisu

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation explains output growth in nations using two different forms of economic capital (health and natural capital) in separate models under paper 1 and 2. In paper 1, income per worker’s growth in the emerging market economies and developing economies is estimated using health capital. Previous studies done on health capital and output growth have mostly focused on Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and advanced economies, but I focused on emerging market economies and developing economies. I examined the association amongst health capital and economic growth in an augmented Solow Model, using total HEX per capita and …

Medicaid Managed Care And Its Impact On Potentially Preventable Hospital Utilization (Inpatient And Emergency Room Visits), Mohammad Usama Toseef

Wayne State University Dissertations

Introduction: The objective of this study is to compare the performance of Medicaid health maintenance organizations (HMOs) and fee-for-service (FFS) Medicaid regarding the prevalence of potentially preventable hospitalizations and emergency room (ER) visits, a recognized measure of outpatient care quality.

Methods: Nationally representative data on non-institutionalized Medicaid recipients, ages 18-64, from the 2003-2012 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey. Separate analyses are conducted for recipients insured through both Medicaid and Medicare (“dual eligibles”) and recipients whose only health insurance is Medicaid (“non-duals”). In each group the occurrence of potentially preventable hospital use is measured, and then survey-weighted multivariable logistic regression models are …

Empirical Study Of Basic Violations, Pay Incentives, And Safety: Evidence From U.S. Intrastate Carriers, Shengyang Ju

Wayne State University Dissertations

Truck drivers are under financial pressure due to inadequacy in their compensation. Thus, they have strong incentives to work more legally or illegally in pursuing a higher income, which leads to fatigue and HOS violations and ultimately causes crashes. On the other hand, FMCSA oversees the motor carrier’s safety performance and tries to improve the current safety measurement since everyone pays a share of the economic costs due to the externality. This dissertation aims to explore the complex relationship between BASICs violations, pay incentives and crashes, to raise the importance of economic impact on carrier’s safety, and to test the …

Essays On Applications Of Spatial Econometric Models, Jihu Zhang

Wayne State University Dissertations

Since the infamous riot of 1967, high crime rates and negative media reports have labeled the city of Detroit as one of the most dangerous cities in the U.S. For a better understanding of crime situation in Detroit, we discuss the spatial interactions of crime rates among block groups as well as the impact of socioeconomic variables on crime by using spatial autoregressive models, crime data, and socioeconomic data. In particular, we introduced a geographical methodology: inverse distance weighting (IDW), which is mainly used to estimate distance based weighting from a scattered set of points. This paper is an essential …

Essays In International Macroeconomics, Arjun Sondhi

Wayne State University Dissertations

Financial crisis of 2007 provides a renewed interest in financial market linkages and their effect on macro variables. In an open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model setting, two things are investigated in this paper. First, what role do financial linkages play in propagating asymmetric cross-country dynamics. Specifically, the impact of a productivity shock in home country leads to a more synchronous behavior in consumption and investment in recessions than in expansions. Secondly, a new source of shock is included, one in the financial sector itself. Cross-country asset prices and fixed assets move identically in this scenario implying perfect risk-sharing.

Essays On Health And Labor Market Outcomes, Maryam Jafari Bidgoli

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between health and labor market outcomes using the 1996-2010 longitudinal RAND Health and Retirement Study (HRS). First, it estimates the relationship between health and labor supply using a simultaneous equation model, treating health as endogenous. The effect of health may be overestimated because people may adjust their non-employment status by their health conditions (justification hypothesis). By using a full information maximum likelihood method, we can conduct a true test of exogeneity on the health variable, taking into account the correlation between two labor supply and health equations’ time-varying error components (unobserved heterogeneity). The results confirm …

Does Tort Reform Affect The Market For Lawyers? Evidence From The U.S States., Ablaye Camara

Wayne State University Dissertations

This paper investigates the determinants of the market for lawyers with a focus on demand variables including tort reform laws. In this study, I used the Feasible Generalized Least Squared method and a Panel Corrected Standard Error method, with year and State identifiers applied to a panel of U.S states, to estimate the determinants of the Number of Lawyers. I also used the Fixed Effect model with year and state identifiers to evaluate the effects of these determinants on the Earnings of Lawyers.

The findings show that the Lagged Number of Lawyers and the Lagged Alternative Earnings are both significant …

Maternal Employment, Quality Time And Children Outcomes, Ahlam El Yaman

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this paper, I explore two relationships using the three waves of the Child Development Supplement of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In the first model, I assess the effect of maternal employment on the quantity and quality of time spent with the child. I use child and family fixed estimation and I also look at whether this relationship varies according to the mother’s educational attainment, the gender and the age of the child. In the second model, I estimate child production functions to examine the effects of quantity and quality of mother-child time on children’s behavioral and cognitive …

The Relationship Between Obesity And Use Of Electronics For Individuals Under The Age Of 21, Zeeshan Haque

Honors College Theses

Today, obesity is one of the largest health problems in America. There are several factors that contribute to obesity – but one problem that has been rising in this generation is the issues of children deciding to play video games, watch television, or spend time on the computer instead of healthier alternatives such as exercising or playing sports. One factor that could attribute to this is the large advancements in technology over the last few decades. The purpose of this research is to identify the relationship between electronics and obesity by analyzing data provided by the NHANES codebook. In this …

Essays On Oil Price Volatility And Irreversible Investment, Daniel Joseph Pastor

Wayne State University Dissertations

In chapter 1, we provide an extensive and systematic evaluation of the relative

forecasting performance of several models for the volatility of daily spot

crude oil prices. Empirical research over the past decades has uncovered

significant gains in forecasting performance of Markov Switching GARCH

models over GARCH models for the volatility of financial assets and crude

oil futures. We find that, for spot oil price returns, non-switching models

perform better in the short run, whereas switching models tend to do better

at longer horizons.

In chapter 2, I investigate the impact of volatility on firms' irreversible investment decisions using real …

The Cost And Technical Efficiency Of Nursing Homes: Do Five–Star Quality Ratings Matter?, Rajendra Dulal

Wayne State University Dissertations

Chapter 1 examines the determinants of nursing home costs and cost efficiency, and investigates how various measures of nursing home care quality influence both of these. It applies a one-step stochastic frontier approach to a large panel of California nursing homes surveyed between 2009 and 2013. Quality is measured by three different ratings available on the Nursing Home Compare website: rating on quality measures, rating on the health inspection, and rating on staffing levels. Results show that the rating on quality measures, an outcome-based measure of quality, is inversely related to costs but unrelated to mean cost efficiency. In other …

The Relationship Between Healthcare Spending And Gross Domestic Product: A Study From A Sample Of African Countries, Steven Harrington Addo

Wayne State University Dissertations

In this essay I estimate the elasticity of total healthcare expenditures with respect to gross domestic product. I also address the stationary properties of total healthcare expenditures and gross domestic product, and whether these measures are cointegrated. The empirical exercise uses a sample of African countries so that the estimates can be compared to those that have been made using data on OECD countries. To address the issue of possible endogeneity of GDP in the healthcare expenditure equation, I assume that total healthcare expenditures and gross domestic product are simultaneously determined, and using structural equations, I identify instrumental variables for …

Essays On Healthy Aging From The Perspective Of A Health Production Function, Nasim Baghban Ferdows

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the determinants of healthy aging among older adults using Grossman’s framework of a health production function. Healthy aging is produced using a variety of inputs, including some determined in early life, such as health and socioeconomic status as a child, others determined in young adulthood, such as education, others determined in mid-life, such as household wealth, and still others determined in later-life, such as current health habits. A production function for healthy aging is estimated using nationally representative data from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study on non-institutionalized seniors, and positing a simultaneous equations mediation model, recognizing …

Essays In Health Economics, Nayan Krishna Joshi

Wayne State University Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three essays in health economics. In the first essay, I use the matched data set constructed from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the Survey of Consumer Finances for period 1989-2010 to investigate the impacts of housing and financial wealth on healthcare spending. The results indicate significant housing and financial wealth effects and relatively large housing wealth effects for the pooled sample. Results for each survey years of the Survey of Consumer Finances further suggest that housing wealth effects are significant for all years and relatively large, but financial wealth effects are insignificant in most cases. Analysis …

Parental Schooling And Child Health: Evidence From Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, Udbodha Ushakar Rijal

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study applies bivariate probit models to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data set to explore the effects of parental schooling on the physical and mental health of child and the underlying mechanism of the transmission of these beneficial effects. Using the perceived physical and mental health status of child as the outcome variable, the results indicate that the benefits of parental schooling increases with levels of parental schooling; mother’s schooling has greater impacts than father’s; and the impacts of parental schooling on physical health of child is slightly larger than on mental health. For instance, relative to having No …

Selection Effect In Medigap Insurance Market With Multi-Dimensional Private Information, Yang Liu

Wayne State University Dissertations

Theoretical models of insurance suggest that when individuals have private information about their risk type alone, insurance coverage will be adversely selected by those riskier individuals due to asymmetric information. In this study we investigate whether individuals have private information of their risk type and riskier individuals are indeed more likely to choose health insurance in the context of Medigap insurance market in the United States where government intervention reinforces information asymmetry. Medigap is supplemental private insurance that optional to those who have Medicare Part A and Part B and it is used to cover some of the cost sharing …

The Effects Of Social Status On The Quality And Affordability Of Healthcare, Robert O. Burns

Honors College Theses

Access to healthcare is very important in today's society, as is the quality of said healthcare. The socioeconomic status (SES) of an individual is the most important factor when it comes to determining both the accessibility and quality of said care, and as such has been studied extensively. Across different countries, lower SES has been linked to the decreased affordability and success rates of medical treatments such as coronary heart disease medication or health risk prevention regimes. In many cases, low SES patients were found to be less likely to seek treatment than higher SES patients as the debt they …

Spillover Effects Of Medicare Advantage Plans: Does The Market Penetration Of Plans Affect Hospital Care Quality?, Qianwei Shen

Wayne State University Dissertations

The percentage of Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in Medicare Advantage (MA) plans increased from 12 percent in 2003 to 28 percent in 2013 out of the about 50 million Medicare enrollees. Although Medicare beneficiaries are increasingly choosing MA plans, little is known about whether and how the market penetration of these plans affect the quality of hospital care provided to Medicare beneficiaries. This issue is extremely important to policy makers when they try to evaluate the importance and effectiveness of current Medicare policy, like Obama Care. This paper is designed to examine the spillover effect on the quality of hospital care …

Dynamics In Health Care Expenditures For Emerging And Developed Countries, Edmundo Roman Reyes

Wayne State University Dissertations

This paper analyzes the dynamics on health care expenditures and health outcomes for emerging and developed countries. The first part of the study focus on the short-run dynamics in health care expenditures for six emerging and a selected group of six developed economies of the OECD group. An error correction model is utilized for the analysis. Results for the presence of a long term relation are consistent within the sample. In addition, direct convergence is found to be consistent as well. The speed of adjustment is larger for emerging economies than for developed economies, which indicates that developed economies would …

Essays In Adaptive Learning And Mean-Square Stability In Regime Switching Models, Jason Robert Reed

Wayne State University Dissertations

The first chapter of this dissertation analyzes the necessary and sufficient conditions for stability under recurring structural changes. Using a finite state Markov process to model stochastically evolving, state-dependent parameters I find that by employing the conditions unique to mean-square stability, the minimum state variable (MSV) solution, found in non-linear models of this reduced form, is also stable in the learning sense. However, the choice of parameter values limits the robustness of this result. Furthermore, to illustrate this outcome I develop empirical results for a model similar to Cagan’s 1956 work on hyperinflation for Germany and the United States. I …

A Three Essay Examination Of Current Pay And Safety Issues In The Truckload Sector Of The Motor Carrier Industry, Michael Robert Faulkiner

Wayne State University Dissertations

Driver turnover remains a significant problem in the truckload sector of the motor carrier industry and has been linked to large truck crashes. Large truck crashes remain a significant problem in the truckload sector of the motor carrier industry. Employing a unique firm level data set from a large U.S. truckload motor carrier, this research showed that higher driver pay reduced driver exit rates, significantly reduced a driver’s relative crash rate, reduced driver probability of sustaining a crash, and lowered the average cost of a crash for the cooperating firm.

This research identified two driver groups who were hired during …

Economic Welfare Of Firefighting Service In Detroit, Matthias H. Jung

Wayne State University Dissertations

Chapter 1 is concerned with the effect of public fire service quality on individual utility. I develop a theoretical model to account for fire risk as a function of socio-economic, housing, and spatial factors. I review relevant literature on certain inherent public fire service issues regarding technology and cost structure before I briefly discuss the importance of public fire service with regard to overall social welfare. Finally, I employ equity mapping in a case study to assess the effect of a budget cut on equity of fire service allocation in Detroit.

Chapter 2 examines whether socio-economic factors, various aspects of …

Essays On Horizontal Divestitures And Product Market Relationships, Norkeith Ervin Smith

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation is the first to study the product effect of horizontal divestitures on upstream and downstream firms. This first essay examines product market impact of a sample of horizontal asset sales from 1988 to 2005 on corporate customers, suppliers, and industry rivals. I create a sample of firms that classifies corporate customers, suppliers, and industry competitors of firms proposing horizontal asset sales, and employ this data set to investigate the wealth effects at announcement. This study also considers post-divestiture changes in abnormal operating performance for divesting firms, customers, and suppliers.

I document evidence that divestiture related wealth effects for …

Economic Determinants Of Quality Of Care In Nursing Homes, Wei Lu

Wayne State University Dissertations

ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF QUALITY OF CARE IN NURSING HOMES

This dissertation examines the factors that will affect nursing home quality of care using several national data sources on market regulation, county demographic characteristics, market structural and the characteristics of different types of long-term care providers in 2010.

The first study examines how nine different measures of nursing home care quality respond to the greater levels of local market competition from these alternative providers of long-term care, as well as other nursing homes. Findings reveal that faced with greater competition from assisted living facilities, nursing homes are left to care for …

Economic Analysis Of Preventive Care Utilization Among Older Adults, Boon Peng Ng

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to examine the economic determinants of the use of preventive services among older adults. It contains two studies that focus on the effects of public health policy and health shocks on the initiation of use of preventive services among older adults.

In January 2005, Medicare began covering a one-time initial preventive physical examination (IPPE), also called a "Welcome to Medicare" visit, for new beneficiaries. This benefit was only available during a beneficiary's first six months after enrolling in Part B. The first study examines the effects of covering an IPPE on the use of mammograms, breast self-exams, …

Can Animal Spirits Solve The Forward Premium Puzzle?, Anthony Paul Shkrelja

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation decomposes, discusses, and ventures to solve an international macroeconomic anomaly known as the "Forward Premium Puzzle" into three main chapters. Chapter 1 explores the state of research pertaining to the Forward Premium Puzzle, which derives from a failure in the Uncovered Interest Parity (UIP). The body of literature is split into three branches i. Those works advocating the presence of an anomaly due to assumption of Rational Expectations, ii. Works preserving the assumption of Rational Expectations and instead discuss a bias due to Risk Premia, and iii. Research focused on econometric implementation of the forward premium estimator. Furthermore, …