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Essays On The Minimum Wage, Immigration, And Privatization, Doruk Cengiz

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation empirically examines effects of the minimum wage, immigration, and privatization; three of the most crucial policies that impact workers worldwide using recent advances in statistics and econometrics to provide causally interpretable results, and to reconcile controversies in the literature. In the first chapter, titled “Seeing Beyond the Trees: Using machine learning to estimate the impact of minimum wages on affected individuals”, I identify minimum wage workers prior to estimating its effects using machine learning tools, and provide highly representative demographically-based groups that capture as much as 73.4% of all likely minimum wage workers. I find that there is …