Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Essays In Capital Mobility, Growth, And Macroeconomic Volatility, Ping-Hang Fan

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises three chapters in international macroeconomics. Specifically, we focus on international financial integration and its linkage to economic growth and volatility. In Chapter 1, we revisit the Feldstein-Horioka (1980) puzzle that saving-investment correlation exhibits a pattern contrary to expectation, being higher among the OECD countries that are more financially integrated and lower among emerging markets economies with less financial integration and greater capital controls. We find that the evolution of FH coefficient is highly consistent with increased financial integration over time, thus resolving the puzzle dynamically. We also explain the cross-country component of the puzzle by showing that …

Three Essays On The Economic Costs Of Armed Conflict, Anton Parlow

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the economic cost of armed conflict.

The first essay focuses on the impact of an armed conflict on children's health. The exposure to violence in utero and early in life has adverse impacts on children's age-adjusted height. Using the experience of the Kashmir insurgency, I find that children more affected by the insurgency are 0.9 to 1.4 standard deviations shorter compared with children less affected by the insurgency. The effect is larger for children born during peaks in violence. Also, children affected by the insurgency are more likely to be sick in the …

Bi- And Multi Level Game Theoretic Approaches In Mechanical Design, Ehsan Ghotbi

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a game theoretic approach to solve bi and multi-level optimization problems arising in mechanical design. Toward this end, Stackelberg (leader-follower), Nash, as well as cooperative game formulations are considered. To solve these problems numerically, a sensitivity based approach is developed in this dissertation. Although game theoretic methods have been used by several authors for solving multi-objective problems, numerical methods and the applications of extensive games to engineering design problems are very limited. This dissertation tries to fill this gap by developing the possible scenarios for multi-objective problems and develops new numerical approaches for solving them.

This dissertation …

Three Essays In Labor Economics, Benjamin Jack Van Kammen

Theses and Dissertations

There are three chapters in this dissertation, each of which consists of a journal-length article. They are on the following subjects.

The first chapter uses ordinances in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. to measure the effects of mandated paid sick leave on employment and wages. Using the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, an employment increase is observed in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. relative to places without an ordinance. This evidence suggests that sick leave mandates correct a market failure of under-provision of benefits.

The second chapter uses a novel measure of distance based on the O*Net Content Model …

Three Essays In Housing Markets, Christopher David Fletcher

Theses and Dissertations

The 2007 collapse of housing price and subsequent recession highlighted the fundamental role housing plays in the economy. Housing is not only one of the largest single expenditures most consumers have but also has a large impact on both local and national economies. In this dissertation I investigate three aspects of the housing market. The first essay shows the role that government policy can have in impacting housing prices and rents through an examination of the Arizona immigration enforcement legislation of 2010. I show that the implementation of the legislation had a negative impact on Arizona's rents and housing prices, …

Three Essays In Applied Labor Economics, Jessica Milli

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation is to apply theoretical and empirical methodologies used in the field of labor economics to analyze several topics which have clear policy implications.

Chapter 1 analyzes the relationship between domestic violence and welfare receipt in a more rigorous framework than has been previously possible. It is well documented that there is a strong relationship between abuse and welfare receipt and the assumption has predominantly been that welfare receipt affects the risk of victimization. I show that the direction of impact actually runs in the opposite direction. This finding is critical in light of the welfare …

Essays In Health Economics And Public Health Policy, Rahi Abouk

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays. In the first essay I study the effect of texting bans on fatal accidents on roadways. Since 2007, many states passed laws prohibiting text messaging while driving. Using vehicular fatality data from across the United States and standard difference-in-differences techniques, bans appear moderately successful at reducing single vehicle, single occupant accidents if they are universally applied and enforced as a primary offense. Bans enforced as secondary offences, however, have at best no effect on accidents. Any reduction in accidents following texting bans is short-lived, however, with accidents returning to near former levels within a …

The Sustainability Of Lean Manufacturing As A Competitive Advantage, Louis G. Jones

Theses and Dissertations

Since the early 1990s lean manufacturing has been employed by companies looking to reduce costs, increase efficiencies and improve quality. Academic studies of the financial benefits of lean manufacturing are mixed in their results, where some show benefit and others do not. The objective of the current work was to confirm a financial benefit of lean manufacturing, while also establishing whether such a financial advantage was sustainable. Financial data was collected for a large number of companies in the manufacturing sector, over the period from 1990 to 2010. The data were used to show correlation between inventory turns and return …

Essays On Asset Return And Housing Market, Swati Kumari

Theses and Dissertations

The last two decades have witnessed substantial amount of research on time variation in asset returns. It has been found that macroeconomic variables contain useful information about asset returns. This dissertation consists of three essays that study the link between the macroeconomy and financial markets. A central idea behind the link is that households adjust their consumption spending in anticipation of variations in the return on household assets.

The first essay proposes a latent-variables approach to estimate expected returns on total household assets and expected growth rate of excess consumption (consumption in excess of labor income) within a present-value model …

Essays In Open Economy Macroeconomics, Amr Hosny

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three chapters in applied open-economy macroeconomics. The first chapter examines the autonomy of domestic monetary policy in the context of the renowned macroeconomic policy trilemma in open economies. The contribution is in using a time-varying parameter methodology that examines the dynamics of monetary policy independence over time and thus improves on existing literature that only provides a single estimate for the coefficients of interest, whereas it is shown that these coefficients significantly change over time as countries exhibit different exchange rate regimes and capital mobility positions, especially during the post Bretton-Woods period. The second chapter …

Three Essays On Quantile Regression, Liang Wang

Theses and Dissertations

The first chapter studies identification, estimation, and inference of general unconditional treatment effects models with continuous treatment under the ignorability assumption. We show identification of dose-response functions under the assumption that selection to treatment is based on observables. We consider estimation of dose-response functions through moment restriction models with generalized residual functions which are possibly non-smooth, and propose a semiparametric two-step estimator. This general formulation includes average and quantile treatment effects as special cases. The asymptotic properties of the estimator are derived. We also develop statistical inference procedures and show the validity of a bootstrap approach to implement these methods …

Essays On Monetary Policy And Financial Markets, Hardik Arvind Marfatia

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation utilizes the valuable information present in forward looking financial securities to understand important aspects of monetary policy analysis. In the first chapter, I attempt to address the long standing empirical challenge of estimating the forward-looking component of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC). Since future inflation expectations are unobservable, I use the information in the inflation-indexed bond market to estimate the NKPC for the U.K. In order to account for any possible measurement error present in the inflation-indexed bond market proxy, the unobserved component model is used. This approach has the advantage of being able to extract the …

The Role Of Gender In Intergenerational Transmissions Of Education And Occupational Promotion, Si Wang

Theses and Dissertations

While several studies have suggested the importance of maternal schooling to children's outcomes during childhood, less is known about the role when the child is older. In the first chapter, I estimate the relationship between maternal education and children's college attendance. After developing a theoretical model to consider the transmission of education across generations, I use the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult Surveys for empirical analysis. College proximity is used as an instrument for mother's schooling. All else equal, results suggest that maternal schooling significantly increases a child's probability of attending college by about 2 to 3 percentage points. The …

Does Human Genetic Diversity Affect Net Productivity?, Breyon Jontae Williams

Theses and Dissertations

Quamrul Ashraf and Oded Galors' (2013) study, "The `Out of Africa' Hypothesis, Human Genetic Diversity, and Comparative Economic Development", seeks to explain cross-country variations in economic development, particularly per capita income, through variations in human genetic diversity. Their analysis depends on two fundamental assumptions; genetic diversity's positive effect upon technological productivity and its negative effect upon social capital. This study tests the validity of the results presented by Ashraf and Galor. Specifically, this study seeks to test whether or not the hump-shape relationship observed between income per capita and predicted genetic diversity is validated. Our empirical work supports their findings.