Download or read book Essays on Economies with Heterogeneous Labor written by Brandon Charles Lehr and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, I study two different economies that consist of heterogeneous labor. By allowing for differences among individuals where previous analyses restricted attention to homogeneous labor, I am able to understand the impact of such a consideration on issues of optimal policy and potential equilibria. The first chapter, Optimal Social Insurance with Individual Private Insurance and Moral Hazard, characterizes optimal social insurance in an economy where competitive firms also provide insurance to workers facing uncertain outcomes. An ex-ante heterogeneous population of workers exerts effort to increase the likelihood of high outcome events. This chapter is novel in its joint consideration of two sources of heterogeneity, two potential sources of insurance, and an endogenous ex-post distribution of outcomes. The introduction of ex-ante heterogeneity in the presence of optimal private insurance changes the optimal prescription for social insurance away from zero. Moreover, the relative source of the variation in outcomes due to ex-ante heterogeneity and ex-post shocks plays a significant role in the welfare loss associated with setting optimal social insurance without recognizing the presence of private insurance. The second chapter, Efficiency Wages with Heterogeneous Agents, builds a model of efficiency wages with heterogeneous workers in the economy who differ with respect to their disutility of labor effort. In such an economy, two types of pure strategy symmetric Nash equilibria in firm wage offers can exist: a no-shirking equilibrium in which all workers exert effort while employed and a shirking equilibrium in which within each firm some workers exert effort while others shirk. The type of equilibrium that prevails in the economy depends crucially on the extent of heterogeneity among the workers. In addition, it is shown that the characterization of the economy is independent of allowing for variable labor hours and the subsequent adverse selection problem it introduces, as there does not exist a pure strategy symmetric separating Nash equilibrium. Finally, in the third chapter I correct the proof of the main proposition in the analysis of an efficiency wage model with a continuum of heterogeneous agents constructed by Albrecht and Vroman (1998).

Download or read book Essays on Macroeconomics with Heterogeneous Agents written by Kyooho Kwon and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Chapter 1 develops a heterogeneous-agent general equilibrium model that incorporates both intensive and extensive margins of labor supply. A nonconvexity in the mapping between time devoted to work and labor services distinguishes between extensive and intensive margins. We consider calibrated versions of this model that differ in the value of a key preference parameter for labor supply and the extent of heterogeneity. The model is able to capture the key features of the empirical hours worked distribution, including how individuals transit within this distribution. We then study how the various specifications influence labor supply responses to temporary shocks and permanent tax changes, with a particular focus on the intensive and extensive margin elasticities in response to these changes. We find important interactions between heterogeneity and the extent of curvature in preferences. Chapter 2 builds a model of family labor supply in which individuals choose between full-time work, part-time work, and nonemployment. The model is calibrated to replicate the movements of both male and female workers among these states. The willingness to substitute hours over time (the so-called intertemporal elasticity of labor supply) is critical for many economic analysis. A common strategy for uncovering the value of this willingness is to carry out structural estimation on micro panel data. One general issue in this estimation exercises using micro data is that misspecification of the constraints that individuals face is likely to influence inference about preference parameters. In the model economy, although the individual labor supply problem is a discrete choice problem, individuals are able to adjust hours along the intensive margin by moving between part-time and fulltime work. Intuitively, adjustment along the intensive margin potentially allows one to estimate the true value of the underlying curvature parameter describing the utility from leisure. We explore the extent to which standard labor supply methods can achieve this in our setting. Although these methods deliver precise estimates that are significantly different from zero, the estimates are effectively unrelated to the true underlying values. These methods also deliver elasticity estimates for women, even when the underlying preference parameters are the same for men and women. Chapter 3 investigates the optimal progressive tax code in an incomplete-market economy in which households are linked intergenerationally by altruism and earning ability. The model economy is calibrated to that of the US with the progressive tax code suggested by Gouviea and Strauss (1994). First, I compute the equilibrium with the optimal progressive tax code. Second, I investigate the extent to which the size of government welfare programs affects the optimal progressivity of the income tax code. I find that the optimal tax code for an economy populated with altruistic households is approximately equivalent to a proportional tax of 23.1% with a fixed deduction of approximately $17,000 in 1990 US dollars. For an economy populated with non-altruistic households, however, these numbers are 18.8% and $12,000 respectively. This result implies that inequality is more severe in an economy with intergenerational links so that the policy maker requires a more progressive tax system to provide insurance. Additionally, I find that when the size of the government welfare program is chosen carefully, the additional insurance benefits from the progressive income tax code disappear"--Pages iv-v.

Download or read book Essays on Heterogeneous Agents written by Christian Bredemeier and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Labor Economics written by Shahriar Sadighi and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three essays in empirical labor economics which are self-contained and can be read independently of the others. The first essay, coauthored with Professor Modestino, measures mismatch unemployment in US economy in the post-recession era and explores the heterogeneity among educational groupings. The second essay estimates the changing effects of cognitive ability on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults between 1980s and 2000s. The third essay, coauthored with Professor Dickens, examines the impact of measurement error in survey data on identifying the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US economy. Essay I: No Longer Qualified? Changes in the Supply and Demand for Skills within Occupations-- In this study, we extend the framework developed by Sahin et al. (2014) to measure mismatch unemployment since the end of the Great Recession and explore the heterogeneity among educational groupings. Our findings indicate that mismatch across two-digit industries and two- digit occupations explain around 17- 20 percent of the recent recovery in the US unemployment rate since 2010. We also capture movements in employer education requirements over time using a novel database of 87 million online job posting aggregated by Burning Glass Technologies and further show that mismatch is not only greater in magnitude for high-skill occupations but also is more persistent over the course of the recent labor market recovery, possible accounting for the shift rightward that has been observed in the aggregate Beveridge Curve by other researchers. Furthermore, we shed light on at least one of the potential causes of mismatch on the demand side, providing evidence that labor demand shifts among high-skilled occupation groups exhibit a permanent increase in the share of employers requiring a Bachelor's degree as well as other baseline, specialized, and software skills listed on job postings, suggesting a role for structural shifts associated with changes in technology or capital investment. Our results demonstrate that equilibrium models where unemployed workers accumulate specific human capital and, in equilibrium, make explicit mobility decisions across distinct labor markets, can mean that workers are chasing a moving target-at least among high-skilled occupations. Furthermore, our findings inform debates focused on workforce development strategies and related educational policies where decision making could benefit from the use of real-time labor market information on employer demands to provide guidance for both job placement as well as program development. Essay II: The Changing Impacts of Cognitive Ability on Determining Earnings of College Bound and Non-College Bound Young Adults-- Using data on young adults from the 1979 and 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I investigate the changing impact of cognitive ability, as captured by performance on AFQT tests, on wage determination of college bound and non-college bound young adults. My findings indicate that cognitive ability plays a substantially diminished role for the most recent cohort and its impact on wage determination has undergone a drastic change between 1980s and 2000s. My results tend to corroborate the findings of previous studies which emphasize the lifecycle path of technological development from adoption to maturation and trace back the labor market outcomes observed over these periods to pre- and post-2000 patterns in technology investment and its consequent boom-and-bust cycles in the demand for cognitive skills. Essay III: Measurement Error in Survey Data and its Impact on Identifying the Extent of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity-- In this study, we employ data drawn from the 1996, 2001, 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, which cover the years 1996-2013, to assess the effectiveness of dependent interviewing at reducing bias in the estimates of the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in the US economy. In the 2004 and 2008 panels of the SIPP, dependent interviewing was used much more extensively than in the past. This questioning method by focusing on changes rather than levels of wages and using responses from prior interviews to query apparent inconsistencies over time reduces the incidence of reporting and measurement errors. Our change-in-wage distributions derived from SIPP 2004 and 2008 panels exhibit remarkably larger zero-spikes and asymmetries vis-℗♭℗ -vis those derived from 1996 and 2001 panels before dependent interviewing was used. These results are consistent with the findings of previous studies that used payroll data or statistical techniques to correct for reporting error. We apply one such technique to the SIPP panels before and after the introduction of dependent interviewing. In the pre-2004 panels the correction is large and results in a distribution that closely resembles the uncorrected distributions of the 2004 panel. When the correction is applied to the 2004 panel no evidence of errors is found.

Download or read book Three Essays in Industrial Organization and Labor Economics written by Max Rempel and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dissertation is comprised of three papers. In the first two Chapters, I analyze the importance of competition, preference heterogeneity, and socio-economic/country-specific factors to explain the differences in penetration rates of mobile phone services across EU Member States. Chapter 1 presents a model of demand and supply for mobile phone services in which products are perceived as homogenous but consumers are heterogeneous with respect to their valuation of the services. Once a service is purchased, consumers (temporarily) leave the market. The parameters which govern the distribution of preferences are allowed to vary by country and will be estimated as part of the demand specification. The model matches the data well and is able to replicate the observed u-shape in the coefficient of variation in penetration rates over the sample period. Using the demand parameters, consumer acquisition costs are backed out and counterfactual experiments performed. I find that preference heterogeneity and differences in the cost of consumer acquisition explain most of the variation in penetration rates across countries. Competition and other control variables, such as the price of fixed-line calls, play only a minor role. In Chapter 2 I relax the assumption that firms are perceived as homogenous and model them as differentiated products. I incorporate endogenous population weights in a standard random coefficients logit model to capture changes in the demographic composition of potential buyers over time due to the (temporary) market exit of adopters. Compared to the results of Chapter 1, I find a larger role of competition and a smaller impact of the (net) cost of consumer acquisition in explaining differences in mobile phone services diffusion. In the third Chapter, I analyze the effect of a product introduction on labor supply. I demonstrate that it is possible to overcome many of the limitations associated with the lack of individual level purchase data by focusing on teenage labor supply and the introduction of video game consoles. I find that 16- to 17-year old male teenagers significantly increase their hours of work in the months prior to video console introductions beyond the usual male-female difference.

Download or read book Essays in Macroeconomic Effects of Labor Market Heterogeneity and Impact of Public Policies on Labor Outcomes written by Ammar Farooq and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation explores the macroeconomic implications of heterogeneity in labor markets and the role of public policy in improving labor market efficiency. First, I aim to shed light on the importance of individual and firm level decisions in determining aggregate labor market outcomes such as the level of mismatch in worker skills and job requirements. Second, I analyze the role of public policy in affecting these decisions and hence, the economy wide aggregates.

Download or read book Essays on Endogenous Growth Economic Openness and Labor Allocation written by Young Joon Kim and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 introduces an endogenous growth model, and Chapter 2 and 3 provides empirical evidence in support of the growth model. Chapter 1 presents a simple endogenous growth model. It is based on Romer (1990), but extends the original model by incorporating individual workers skill heterogeneity. Based on the heterogeneity, the model has a labor allocation mechanism between skilled and less-skilled sectors. This labor allocation determines the long-run growth rate of the economy. The model shows how the distribution of human capital affects on the labor allocation, and hence on the economic growth and income distribution. The model can be extended to an open economy. With the heterogeneity, the extended model explains distributional effect as well as growth effect of the economic openness. Chapter 2 provides empirical evidence in support of the model presented in the chapter 1. The human capital measures from the model show better performance in explaining the role of human capital on a country's income per worker. The proposed human capital measures also perform better in growth regressions. When the three specifications based on three different models (Solow, Nelson and Phelps and Romer) are implemented using a panel of 45 countries, the human capital measures based on the Romer-type endogenous growth model provide the most significant relation between human capital and economic growth. Chapter 3 provides empirical evidence in support of the extension part of the model presented in the chapter 1. According to the model, economic openness can affect labor allocation through two channels; knowledge spillover and specialization. First, the openness promotes knowledge spillovers and hence increases the productivity of workers in skilled sectors. This makes the economy employs more workers in skilled sector. Second, the openness causes global specialization which leads more employment in skilled sector for advanced countries, but at the same time less employment in skilled sector for less-advanced countries. The empirical results obtained using cross country panel data support these two effects of knowledge spillover and specialization.

Download or read book Essays on Labor Market with Heterogeneous Workers written by Eunsun Gil and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in my dissertation examine how economic downturn and job composition affect heterogeneous workers in the labor market. In Chapter 1, I assert that slow recovery in aggregate employment compared to aggregate output in the United States consist of jobless growth in manufacturing and information industries. I observe the industrial transition of unemployed workers to demonstrate labor reallocation triggered by a decline of middle-wage jobs. I simulate the jobless growth and vertical reallocation in general equilibrium model with sorting and optimal submarket choices. In Chapter 2, I quantify recession effect on annual labor income for heterogeneous workers. I find that low-wage workers earn less annually mostly because of lower working hours through unemployment, whereas high-wage workers lose their annual earnings primarily due to lower hourly rates of job-to-job transition. I explain decreasing layoff risk (extensive margin) and increasing wage-cut risk (intensive margin) to previous wage rate in an on-the-job search model with real business cycles. In Chapter 3, I reassess transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancy rate in a homogeneous agents search model, by allowing sunk entry costs and discrete productivity process. The entry costs allow a positive outside option for a vacant firm so that an outside firm and vacant firm make different labor market participation and hiring choices. When economy transit between two steady-state equilibria, the vacancy rate is no more a jump variable, and an outward (inward) shift is expected before reaching a low (high) productivity equilibrium.

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor Economics written by Shintaro Yamaguchi and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays in Labor Economics written by Shiv K. Saini and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Market with Heterogeneous Workers written by Eunsun Gil and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in my dissertation examine how economic downturn and job composition affect heterogeneous workers in the labor market. In Chapter 1, I assert that slow recovery in aggregate employment compared to aggregate output in the United States consist of jobless growth in manufacturing and information industries. I observe the industrial transition of unemployed workers to demonstrate labor reallocation triggered by a decline of middle-wage jobs. I simulate the jobless growth and vertical reallocation in general equilibrium model with sorting and optimal submarket choices. In Chapter 2, I quantify recession effect on annual labor income for heterogeneous workers. I find that low-wage workers earn less annually mostly because of lower working hours through unemployment, whereas high-wage workers lose their annual earnings primarily due to lower hourly rates of job-to-job transition. I explain decreasing layoff risk (extensive margin) and increasing wage-cut risk (intensive margin) to previous wage rate in an on-the-job search model with real business cycles. In Chapter 3, I reassess transitional dynamics of unemployment and vacancy rate in a homogeneous agents search model, by allowing sunk entry costs and discrete productivity process. The entry costs allow a positive outside option for a vacant firm so that an outside firm and vacant firm make different labor market participation and hiring choices. When economy transit between two steady-state equilibria, the vacancy rate is no more a jump variable, and an outward (inward) shift is expected before reaching a low (high) productivity equilibrium.

Download or read book Essays on Heterogeneous Firms in International Economics written by Konstantinos Costas Arkolakis and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Firms Aggregate Uncertainty and the Labor Market written by Nicolò Dalvit and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis is comprised of three chapters that revolve around two main themes:the micro economic incidence of macro shocks and the role of firms in determining labor market outcomes. In the first chapter I provide new evidence on the cyclical dynamics of firms. I show that firms expecting to lose market share in the futureare hit the hardest during economic downturns. This heterogeneous sensitivity provides a new rationale for the observed counter-cyclical dispersion in firms'growth rates and has implications for the dynamics of aggregate employment. The second chapter studies the role of income tax progressivity in reallocating income risk across heterogeneous workers and stabilizing the economy. We show that eliminating income tax progressivity in Italy would come at the expense of the majority of the work force. The current system of marginal tax rates is effective atreallocating cyclical income risk from low to high wage workers and reducesaggregate employment volatility compared to a counter-factual flat rate system.The third chapter considers the internal hierarchical structure of a firm and its rolein determining wages and internal promotions. We focus in particular on the rolethat internal hierarchies play in propagating gender differences in representation and pay. We study the effect of a change in the gender composition at the top afirm's internal hierarchy on workers further down the organizational ladder and findsome evidence of an effect only on layers close to the top.

Download or read book Essays on Information in Labor Economics written by Kenneth Shangold Mirkin and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapter 1: It is a commonly held view that the quality of unemployed workers varies countercyclically. During economic downturns, firms raise standards for retaining workers---better workers are fired, so it is natural to expect an accompanying rise in the unemployment pool's quality. However, I present a model in which the reverse is true. Firms learn about employee quality over time and fire their lowest quality workers, but workers enter unemployment also via quitting. In equilibrium, the quality of the unemployment pool reflects a balance between flows of selective firings and of (relatively higher quality) quits. Although firms fire better workers during economic downturns, there are more of these firings at such times, and quits are no longer sufficient to balance the corresponding negative selection---the unemployment pool thus \textit{declines} in quality. I use the model to explore the dynamic consequences of this. Firms limit hiring in response, and even after the economy rebounds otherwise, hiring will not resume until the unemployment pool's quality recovers. This offers a possible contributing factor to jobless recoveries. Using CPS micro-data and JOLTS, I then provide empirical support for several testable implications of the model, focusing on direct evidence for the mechanism driving the decline in unemployment pool quality. The model is consistent with other, previously-observed empirical patterns as well, and it provides a tractable framework for dynamic analysis of labor markets with private learning during employment. Chapter 2: We consider a dynamic trading environment, where heterogeneous buyers and sellers are randomly paired in each period. Within each match, seller types become observable while buyer types remain private information, and sellers make take-it-or-leave-it offers. We first establish the existence of steady-state equilibrium where sellers offer prices that are continuous in their types. We then characterize properties of sorting under search frictions of varied strength, focusing on two extreme cases. With maximal search frictions---complete disregard for future payoffs---we demonstrate that log-supermodularity (log-submodularity) of the production function is a necessary and sufficient condition for positive (negative) assortative matching. Log-supermodularity (Log-submodularity) is stronger than the standard supermodularity (submodularity) sorting condition. The resistance to sorting comes from the fact that higher type sellers have stronger incentive to secure trade by lowering prices. At the other extreme, the incentive to secure trade grows inconsequential when search frictions vanish and hence the condition for positive (negative) sorting returns to supermodularity (submodularity). Chapter 3: We study the dynamics of a market where agents trade assets that are heterogeneous in quality, but publicly indistinguishable. All agents begin with only public knowledge of the aggregate asset pool composition, but each owner learns privately about the quality of an asset in her possession. Ownership entails a constant choice between (i) the value of retaining the asset (and its corresponding payoffs) and (ii) that of selling it on the market for a uniform price that reflects the instantaneous average quality of assets being sold. In turn, the market composition reflects not only those owners who have opted for (ii), but also owners selling for reasons unrelated to asset quality. Learning is gradual, so ownership can be understood as an optimal experimentation problem. Whereas an environment with public learning would entail symmetric timing of sales, private learning precludes this due to externalities sellers exert on other market participants. Instead, owners must spread sales over a broad time interval and, in turn, must experiment inefficiently. Qualitatively, price dynamics resemble those found in speculation-fueled ``panics'' of the sort often invoked to explain market breakdowns. After an initial period without movement, prices enter a steady decline. Eventually, the stock---and corresponding flow---of owners looking to sell due to poor asset performance grows thin. Prices stop falling and finally rise as the presence of adverse selection fades from the market.

Download or read book Essays in Labor Economics written by Keshar Ghimire and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, in the standard three-essay format, studies three distinct but closely related aspects of the United States labor markets. Chapter 1 attempts to identify the main drivers of potential migration to the United States by using administrative data from the United States Diversity Visa Lottery. Estimating fixed effects panel data models that control for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity in source-country level determinants of potential migration, I find that income levels in source countries and educational attainment of the source-country population play important role in determining migration intentions. Specifically, a one percent increase in per capita Gross Domestic Product of a source country decreases the potential migration rate from that country to the US by 1.36%. Similarly, a one percent increase in the educational attainment of source population (measured as the percentage of population with at least secondary education) decreases potential migration rate by 1.16%. The results obtained in this chapter improve our understanding of the composition of US labor markets by identifying the most important socio-economic variables that drive migration to the US. Chapter 2 estimates the causal impact of a change in supply of immigrant entrepreneurs on entrepreneurial propensities of natives. I draw data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and use withinstate variation in supply of immigrant entrepreneurs for identification. To address concerns of endogeneity in the supply of immigrant entrepreneurs, I take advantage of a quasi-experiment provided by the State Children's Health Insurance Program. I find that, on average, immigrants self-employed in unincorporated businesses have no discernible impact on self-employment propensities of natives. However, immigrants self-employed in incorporated businesses crowd in natives into incorporated self-employment. Specifically, a 1% increase in incorporated immigrant entrepreneurs increases the supply of incorporated native entrepreneurs by 0.11%. Furthermore, various sub-sample analyses demonstrate substantial heterogeneity in the impact of immigrant entrepreneurs on entrepreneurial propensities of natives. The results obtained in this chapter have important implications for policies related to immigration and entrepreneurship development. Finally, Chapter 3 exploits the State Children's Health Insurance Program to investigate the impact of publicly funded health insurance coverage for children on labor supply of adults. Using data from the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey and triple difference identification strategy, the analysis demonstrates that public health insurance for children decreases labor supply of women, both at the extensive and the intensive margin, but increases that of men at the extensive margin. The estimates obtained in this chapter highlight the labor supply distortions associated with welfare benefits.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Economics written by Monica Andini and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis is a collection of essays in Applied Economics. The first essay employs unique Italian data to jointly consider different aspects of the relationship between agglomeration and labor market pooling. The paper looks across all industries from the perspectives of both workers and firms. The study finds evidence of a positive relationship between turnover and agglomeration, evidence of on-the-job learning and evidence consistent with agglomeration improving job matches. However, the estimated labor market pooling gains seem unlikely to account for a substantial share of the agglomeration benefits accruing to workers and firms. The second essay evaluates the effectiveness of a major Italian place-based policy through which the government endorses and finances an industrialization plan proposed by private firms. By using as counterfactuals the areas exposed to the same policy later in time, the study finds little evidence of a positive effect of the program on plants and employment growth rates, which is confined to a small area (municipality) and crowds out the economic growth of the surroundings. The third essay uses the consolidation of Italian municipalities brought about by the fascist dictatorship in the 1920s to gauge the role of the size of local jurisdictions for economic development. It finds that the consolidation was associated with relevant net welfare gains for the communities involved. In particular, the advantages related to the bigger economies of scale in larger jurisdictions overwhelmed the costs owing to the higher heterogeneity. The fourth essay investigates the impact of financial development on the quantiles of the conditional growth distribution. The study presents a growth model showing the quantile effects of finance on growth and provides empirical evidence consistent with the idea that countries in the upper tail of the conditional growth distribution react more than countries in the lower tail to the same financial stimulus.

Download or read book Three Essays on Microfoundations of Economics written by Gaosheng Ju and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, which consists of three essays, studies three applications. Each of them emphasizes the microfoundations of economic models. The first essay proposes a nonparametric estimation of structural labor supply and exact welfare change under nonconvex piecewise-linear budget sets. Different from previous literature, my method focuses on a nonparametric specification of an indirect utility function. I find that working with the indirect utility function is very useful in simultaneously addressing the labor supply problems with individual heterogeneity, nonconvex budget sets, labor nonparticipation, and measurement errors in working hours that previous literature was unable to. Further, the estimated indirect utility function proves to be convenient and efficient in calculating exact welfare change and deadweight loss under general piecewise-linear budget sets. In the second essay, I solve the equity premium, risk-free rate, and capital structure puzzles by laying a more solid microfoundation for consumption-based asset pricing models. I argue that the above two asset pricing puzzles arise from the aggregation of hump-shaped life-cycle consumption into per capita consumption, which accounts for the unanimous rejections of Euler equations in the literature. As for the third puzzle, I show that a firm's capital structure can be determined by heterogenous investors maximizing life-time utility even though the capital structure is irrelevant on the firm side. The endogenously determined leverage generates an even larger equity premium than a fixed one. The third essay studies the solution concepts of coalition equilibrium. Traditional solution concepts such as Strong Nash Equilibrium, Coalition-proof Nash Equilibrium, Largest Consistent Set, and Coalition Equilibrium violate the fundamental principles of individual rationality. I define a new solution concept, Weak Coalition Equilibrium, which requires each coalitional deviation to be within-coalition self-enforceable and cross-coalition self-enforceable. The cross-coalition self-enforceability endows coalitions with farsightedness. Weak Coalition Equilibrium is a generalization of Coalition-proof Nash Equilibrium and a refinement of the concept Nash Equilibrium. It exists under a weak condition. Most importantly, it is in line with the principle of individual rationality.