Economics Commons^™

Essays On Macroeconomics, Sangmin Aum

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates how technological progress shapes economy. Technological changes have heterogeneous effects on economic agents as they are often biased toward certain tasks or sectoral activities. The dissertation aims at understanding the sources of heterogeneity and their impacts on aggregate outcomes, focusing on economic growth and labor allocation.

The first chapter investigates a bi-directional relation between technology and occupational structure (job allocation). Jobs have polarized in the U.S. since at least the 1980s, but the growth of high-skill jobs has been stagnated since 2000s (skill demand reversal). I document that software innovation has increased compared to equipment innovation and …

Essays On Macroeconomics And Economic Development, Lijun Zhu

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1: The labor share of national income in the United States has declined since the 1980s and especially after 2000. My paper focuses on the role played by technological change in this process. In particular, firms that adopt new technologies achieve a low labor share, and grow and take a larger market share over time. An example is online retailers such as Amazon, empowered by information technology, that have a lower labor share than traditional retailers, and have continually expanded over the last 20 years. This realloca- tion process drives down the aggregate labor share. I first document three …

Essays On Economic Growth, Minhyeon Jeong

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation investigates how economic growth is determined in the long run. To do this, I focus mainly on culture and institutions as fundamental growth factors and develop a general theoretical framework in which culture, institutions and growth are all endogenously determined. Using the framework, I highlight the crucial role of interaction between culture and institutions in the long-term growth.

Chapter 1. Endogenous Financial Friction and Growth

The first chapter investigates the role financial frictions play in economic growth. Most existing studies consider an exogenous form of borrowing constraint, the tightness of which is arbitrarily fixed at a certain value …

Essays On Financial And Monetary Economics, Xi Wang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The first part of this dissertation explores an empirical relevance to understand the equity premium puzzle. Since only the wealthiest people invest significant amounts in the stock market (limited participation), it is reasonable to combine the consumption data of the wealthy, instead of aggregate data, with observed asset returns to estimate the risk aversion coefficient (RRA). I approximate the consumption by the rich from two angles: one explores the income and wealth data to back out synthetic consumption directly, and the other explores the sales data to approximate the expenditure by the rich. By using the created indices, the lowest …

Essays On Entrepreneurship, Yvonne (Yinghong) Zhang

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My papers have been focused on topics around entrepreneurship. From a micro perspective, my research adds to the still sparse literature on the entrepreneurial decisions within a household framework; while from a macro perspective, my research investigates the recent declining entrepreneurship in the United States during the past two decades.

I start in Chapter 2 with the empirical finding that married people are more likely to be entrepreneurs than their single counterparts. I identify a causal effect that marriage increases entrepreneurship by employing a recent marriage policy reform in Australia as a natural experiment. The 2008 federal policy reform requires …

Individual Differences In Discounting Delayed Gains, Delayed Losses, And Probabilistic Losses, Yu-Hua Yeh

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many decisions in one’s daily life involve the discounting of delayed or probabilistic losses: Should we pay off our credit-card balance in full or incur interest; should we buy more collision and liability insurance or risk having to pay more in case of an accident? Despite its importance, however, discounting of losses is understudied, and few studies have focused on individual differences. The current study recruited 407 on-line participants through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk who completed three discounting questionnaires: delayed losses, probabilistic losses, and delayed gains. Magnitude effects were observed with delayed gains (i.e., larger delayed gains were discounted less steeply …