Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics and Labor Economics PDF Download

Author: Nigar Nargis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 246

View

Book Description

Author: Serena Patricia Canaan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781369146806
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

View

Book Description
This thesis includes three papers in applied microeconomics. The first paper examines how providing long periods of paid parental leave affects parents' labor market decisions and children's well-being. The second study, co-authored with Pierre Mouganie, documents the labor market returns to quality of higher education for low-achieving students. The last paper looks at the effects of postponing middle school tracking on students' long term labor market outcomes.

Author: Jie Yang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Microeconomics
Languages : en
Pages : 124

View

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters, each of which can be considered an independent essay. The three essays contribute to labor economics, sports economics, and behavioral economics. The first chapter focuses on pay and performance in a team environment. Working in teams increases productivity but also generates incentives to shirk. Recent research suggests that peer enforcement, coupled with financial incentives in a setting of repeated interactions, can play a role in deterring shirking in teams. This paper, entitled "Peer Enforcement in Teams: Evidence from High-Skill Professional Workers with Repeated Interactions," analyzes 10 years of performance and compensation data for NFL offensive linemen, a high-skill, high-salary, repeatedly interacting team, using the Hausman-Taylor estimator to control for unobservable individual-specific heterogeneity. We find evidence that teammates' effort signals reduce the salaries of individual offensive linemen, providing a low powered sanctioning mechanism for individual workers in this setting. A separate, independently monitored individual effort signal also reduces salaries. The second chapter of my dissertation is "Consumption Commitments and Simultaneous Insuring and Gambling: evidence from Canada." This paper extends recent work by Chetty and Szeidl (2007) on a classic economic research question: why do some individuals simultaneously buy insurance and gamble? This behavior is "contradictory" to von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory because insurance purchase indicates risk aversion while gambling indicates risk loving. Chetty and Szeidl (2007) propose a novel explanation based on consumption commitments which magnify risk aversion, inducing Friedman-Savage local non-concavity in the utility function. Theoretically, the paper shows that commitments increase risk loving over gambles with large uncertain payoffs but for gambles with moderate-to-large uncertain payoffs, moderate commitments amplify risk loving, while large commitments mitigate risk loving. Empirically, patterns in household decisions to participate in government-run lotteries, small prize gambles (including casino gambling, slot machines, and video lottery terminals), and to purchase life insurance support these predictions; households with large consumption commitments are more likely to participate in activities with large uncertain payoffs. The last chapter, "The Relationship Between Consumer Spending on Exercise, Sports Betting and Attending Sporting Events" also utilizes data from the SHS, but a large sample - more than 145,000 households. We investigate the relationship between consumer spending on three alternative leisure time activities: sports betting, exercise and attending live sporting events. Recent proposed changes in legal sports betting, and claims about attending games and participation in physical activity motivate analysis of these categories of consumer spending. Using several versions of an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS) and the related Quadratic AIDS (QAIDS) models, we estimate the parameters that determine the relationship between consumer spending on these activities. Results show that betting and attending games are complements. Betting and exercise, and attending games and exercise are substitutes.

Author: Annina Rebecca Eva Eymann Leist
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783866246324
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 242

View

Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. These essays investigate different aspects of the impact of technology on labor market outcomes and firm strategy. The first essay, co-authored with Ronald L. Oaxaca, is in the area of labor economics and it investigates the relation between non-neutral technological change and the gender gap in wages. This essay is the first to address the issue of the recent narrowing of the gender wage gap in the context of technological change by using a novel approach to separately estimate the effects of technological change and discrimination on the gender wage gap. Using a constant elasticity of substitution production function and Current Population Survey data on employment and wages by industry and occupation, the results show that changes in non-neutral technological change explain between 5% and 9% of the narrowing of the wage gap between 1979 and 2001. The latter two essays span topics across applied industrial organization, firm strategy and labor economics. The second component of my dissertation investigates the relation between technological knowledge diffusion through the labor mobility of scientists and the organization of R & D activities by innovative firms. Using a labor mobility measure from the Current Population Survey March Supplements as a measure for inter-firm technology spillovers and a panel of R & D alliance data for 18 U.S. industries between 1989 and 1999, a Poisson estimation shows that firms facing a 10% increase in the labor mobility of scientists have a 5% increase in the annual number of R & D collaborations. The third essay is an empirical analysis of the impact of knowledge dissemination generated by the labor mobility of scientists and engineers on a measure of the pace of innovation. Using an unbalanced panel of firms containing patent data matched with firm data across eight innovative industries, from 1989 to 1998, along with a measure of the labor mobility of scientists and engineers, this essay provides evidence that firms in industries exposed to levels of labor mobility of scientists and engineers that differ by 1%, have an expected time lag between sequential generations of technologies that differs by 0.56 years.

Author: Diego Rodriguez
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 238

View

Book Description

Author: Natalie Kristine Goodpaster
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780549084198
Category : Maternity leave
Languages : en
Pages : 140

View

Book Description
This thesis is composed of three chapters, each with its own theme and contribution to the applied microeconomics literature.

Author: Moon Moon Haque
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description
My dissertation comprises three essays in applied microeconomics. They mostly focused on the evaluation and recommendation of policy issues in the fields of health economics and labor economics, with a direct objective toward to alleviate inequality, and to promote efficient and effective economic policies. The first essay studies how the coverage of health insurance can contribute to obesity (BMI index). First, I extend the the theoretical model of Ehrlich and Becker (1972) to find the relationship between health insurance and obesity; and then supplement the theoretical findings with empirical evidence, using BRFSS data from 2001to 2011 among American young adults. IV regression approach and Lewbel IV (2007) techniques were used to estimate the relationship. The results show that a mere switch from from no health insurance to having insurance is associated with a decrease in BMI of 0.188 kg/m2; which means a weight loss of 1.33 pounds. The second essay explores the possible determinants of out-of-pocket healthcare expenditure (OOPHE) and catastrophic expenditure (CE) in a developing Asian country setting, utilizing a nationally representative random sample of 12,240 households from Bangladesh. Using a Double Hurdle model (Cragg, 1971) approach, I analyze what are the major socioeconomic, demographic and regional factors that are possible determinants of OOPHE and CE. Contrary to common perception that the decesion of whether to spend on healthcare services and how much to spend depend primaily on an individual's health and illness, my analysis shows that illness is but one of the many many factors involved in demand for healthcare. Other influences, such as household characteristics, level of education, types of medical consultants, location, and wealth variable plays a significant role. In addition, expenditure on pharmaceutical drugs is the major component (57%-72%) of healthcare expenditure, and rural households are more likely to suffer CE. Lastly, the third essay studies the empirical evaluations of the effectiveness of reservation policies in Indian labor market. The effectiveness of such prejudicial treatment policies was measured by comparing the relative performance of wage differencials as well as returns to educational attainment accross social caste structure. The study shows that the effectiveness of such policies was positive across all socials groups, although its effect has not been uniform across social structure and in addition, the trend indicates a general decline in benefits of such policies enacted in favor of underprivileged social groups over the survey years. Given the findings, the issue of prejudicial treatment policies still have immense importance from a government policy perspective. .

Author: Konrad Burchard Burchardi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

View

Book Description

Author: Xia Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 266

View

Book Description
This dissertation focuses on applied microeconomics and corporate strategy.