Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Ian E. Novos and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Ioana Sofia Pacurar and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This doctoral dissertation comprises essays in Applied Microeconomics with focus in Health and Regional Economics. The first investigates a neo-classical hospital production model for cost and quality implications by payment source in the context of the 2010 Affordable Care Act. The second essay demonstrates positive crime effects induced by Hurricane Katrina population migration. Specifically, the first essay evaluates hospital cost efficiecies emanating from changes in public reimbursement levels and/or shifts in hospital care demand or health care budgets. Using 2000-2008 data from Tennessee Joint Annual Reports of Hospitals, hybrid generalized translog multi-product cost functions were estimated with controls for multi-dimensional quality, diagnostic mix, and hopital heterogeneity. The production technology cost model, accounting for technological change and geographic effects, was estimated using the Iterative Seemingly Unrelated Regression methodology. Factor demand elasticities, alternative conceptual measures of the elasticites of substitution, scale and scope economies were evaluated. This is the first study to quantify opportunities for exploiting scope economies by payer type (e.g., Medicaid/Tenncare with private payers). Policy implications were explored. Using a natural experiment, the second essay tests an empirical link between the forced evacuation and crime types countrywide and in Houston, TX, while avoiding concerns of endogeneity due to selection or simultaneity. Few prior economic studies of Katrina probed impacts on host labor markets or on evacuees' labor and schooling outcomes, overlooking potential effects on local crime in spite of anecdotal evidence. To ensure identification with a Difference-in-Difference specification, the number of evacuees going to a metropolitan area was instrumented by its distance to New Orleans, LA. Katrina immigration was found to rise the incidence of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, robbery, and motor vehicle theft. The analysis of Houston post-shelter consequences of Katrina on crime showed increases murder, aggravated assault, illegal possession of weapons, and arson. While the regional analysis was based on the Current Population Survey and data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Houston study used data provided by the Police Department. Robustness checks evaluating self-selection utilized the Displaced New Orleans Resident Pilot survey. It remained undetermined whether the crimes were committed by the evacuees, or triggered by their presence.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Jesse Morgan Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Nurfatima Jandarova and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics of Development written by Plamen V. Nikolov and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Applied Microeconomics written by John Michael Lynham and published by ProQuest. This book was released on 2008 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microeconomics is fundamentally about agents who have preferences, form expectations and face constraints (Manski, 2001). This dissertation explores each mechanism in three very different contexts. The first chapter focuses on expectations, the second on preferences and the third on constraints. The three different contexts are diving for sea urchins, gambling on weight loss and studying at the library.

Download or read book Three Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Albert Haewon Choi and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 99 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a contract is signed between two economic agents, it is likely to produce some effect on non-contracting, third parties and provide new information to the contracting parties. This thesis examines how such third party externality and newly generated information should affect the initial form of the contract. In the first essay, a headquarters of a firm designs a mechanism with which it extracts the division managers' superior information about the external market opportunities. The information allows the headquarters to provide optimal investment incentive to the managers and make efficient trading decisions. The essay provides a justification for a real-world headquarters, who delegates all the operating decisions to the division managers but maintains the ultimate authority within the firm. The second essay examines how a client would contract with her lawyer to provide best incentive to the lawyer and maximize her return from litigation. By providing different contingent shares based on settlement and judgment, she is able to provide better incentive without diluting her return from litigation. At the same time, when she has relatively poor bargaining leverage against the counter party, the essay shows that delegating the settlement authority to the lawyer and leaving him a large rent would be more beneficial for the client. The third essay analyzes the salary contracting problem faced by the owner of a firm who is aware of a potential opportunity to sell her firm in the future. The essay demonstrates that when the owner grants a large severance payment to the employee, she would be able to defer the compensation burden to the potential buyer and increase her net return from the firm.

Download or read book Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Jay Kody Walker and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation consists of three essays, each of which implements different data specification schemes to econometrically analyze specific topics in the realm of applied microeconomics and microeconometrics. Three separate questions are asked, and economic data is employed to empirically test the validity of alternative answers. These essays are encapsulated in ranging economic fields, but unified in that microeconomic principles and data analysis methods are employed. The initial essay, which is co-authored with Andrew Hussey and Alex Nikolsko-Rzhevskyy, titled "HIV and Recent Trends in Abortion Rates" tests an empirical link between the introduction of HIV/AIDS into the overall population and its possible impact on unwanted pregnancies as realized in lower abortions rates is in the realm of public and health economics. The second essay titled "Greeks Just Want to Have Fun or Do They? Fraternal Membership and College Outcomes" asks whether or not a student's decision to join a Greek organization during their undergraduate college tenure has significant impacts on collegiate outcomes, which delves into the economics of education, peer effects, and public economics. The third essay titled "A Structural Model of the U.S. Orange Juice Market: Alternative Evaluation Methods for Dumping Charges" takes a particular instance where a domestic industry has claimed that foreign producers have dumped products into the United States domestic market and econometrically tests the validity of those claims. This paper's topic is in the realm of international trade, public choice, and public economics.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Fabio Pinna and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Two Essays on Applied Microeconomics written by Ming-Jen Lin and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Patrick Blanchenay and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Brandon Joel Tan and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three independent essays. The first essay develops an urban spatial model with heterogeneous worker groups and incorporating travel to consume non-tradable goods and services. It estimates the model using detailed farecard and administrative data from Singapore to quantify the impact of the Downtown Line. It estimates large welfare gains for high-income workers, but near zero gains for low-income workers. All workers benefit from improved access to consumption opportunities, but low-income non-tradable sector jobs move to less attractive workplaces. Abstracting away from consumption travel results in a five-fold underestimation of the inequality effects and failure to capture the spatial re-organization of low-income jobs in the city. The second essay studies the consequences of letter grades serving as noisy measures of academic achievement. It exploits a regression-discontinuity design with marks as the running variable and finds that receiving a better grade in a single class results in $32 USD greater monthly earnings post-graduation. The effects are larger than expected from a corresponding cumulative grade point average increase via "employer-signaling", suggesting that future changes in behavior and outcomes may be important. It then finds that marginal students who receive a worse grade take significantly "easier" courses and earn lower grades in future semesters. The third essay uses administrative data from Karnataka, India on the universe of good shipments between any two establishments to measure the extent to which firms own and utilize production links for sourcing physical inputs. It calculates that 11% of input value can be potentially sourced from integrated upstream establishments and that 38% of products are sourced exclusively from within the firm. It compares its methodology to the literature and highlights two sources of bias in previous studies. Finally, it quantifies the extent to which firm boundaries serve as a barrier to trade and looks at factors associated with within-firm sourcing.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Mitchell H. Hoffman and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. All are in personnel economics, using data from the trucking industry. Training by firms is a central means by which workers accumulate human capital, yet firms may be reluctant to train if workers can quit and use their gained skills elsewhere. "Training contracts" that impose a penalty for premature quitting can help alleviate this inefficiency. The first essay from this dissertation studies training contracts in the U.S. trucking industry where they are widely used, focusing on data from one leading firm. Exploiting two plausibly exogenous contract changes that introduced penalties for quitting, I confirm that training contracts significantly reduce quitting. To analyze the optimal design of training contracts and their welfare consequences, I develop and estimate a structural learning model with heterogeneous beliefs that accounts for many key features of the data. The estimation combines weekly productivity data with weekly subjective productivity forecasts for each worker and reveals a pattern of persistent overconfidence whereby many workers believe they will achieve higher productivity than they actually attain. If workers are overconfident about their productivity at the firm relative to their outside option, they will be less likely to quit and more likely to sign training contracts. Counterfactual analysis shows that workers' estimated overconfidence increases firm profits by over $7,000 per truck, but reduces worker welfare by 1.5%. Banning training contracts decreases profits by $4,600 per truck and decreases retention by 25%, but increases worker welfare by 4%. Despite the positive effect of training contracts on profits, training may not be profitable unless some workers are overconfident. A robust finding in experimental psychology and economics is that people tend to be overconfident about their ability. However, much less is known about whether overconfidence can be reduced or eliminated, particularly in field settings. The second essay of this dissertation provides new evidence using data from the workplace. A field experiment with a large trucking firm shows that workers tend to systematically overpredict their productivity and that their overconfidence is unaffected by whether workers receive financial incentives of different sizes for accurate guessing. Randomly informing workers about other workers' overconfidence reduces overconfidence in the short-run, but the effect fades within two weeks. Neither the incentives or information treatments have any effect on worker satisfaction or search behavior. Using long-term survey data from a second firm, I show that experience reduces overconfidence, but only quite slowly. Although workers at both firms exhibit aspects of Bayesian updating, overconfidence appears to be sticky and difficult to change. The third essay analyzes worker referrals. Many firms use referrals in their recruitment and hiring procedures. Are these practices profitable, and if so, why? A model is developed where referrals may improve selection and reduce moral hazard. The model is tested using extremely detailed personnel and survey data from a leading firm in the trucking industry. Referred workers are similar to non-referred workers across a large number of background characteristics and lab experimentally-measured dimensions of preferences. Referred workers are between 10-25% less likely to quit; the effects are strong across all groups of drivers, including new workers for whom the firm invests in expensive firm-sponsored general training. However, referred workers attain similar initial productivity and productivity growth as non-referred workers, and are no more likely to engage in various forms of moral hazard. The accumulation of friends after the starting work does not positively affect retention, productivity, or moral hazard. On net, the evidence is consistent with the idea that referrals benefit firms by selecting workers with a better fit for the job, as opposed to selecting workers with higher overall quality, by affecting worker behavior, or by changing job amenities.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Juan Pantano and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Moon Moon Haque and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. .

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Zachary Aaron Goodman and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays on topics in applied microeconomics. The first essay addresses effective pedagogical tools, and the latter two essays estimate the effects of two distinct tax policies on nutrient consumption. In Chapter 1, we study a novel video-based textbook for intermediate microeconomics. Using a field experiment involving about 400 undergraduates, we estimate the effectiveness of watching videos on exam scores. We find that students experimentally induced to watch more videos perform significantly better on the midterm and final exams. We find no negative spillovers to other courses within the quarter of the experiment, and we find sustained takeup of the videos in the following quarter. In Chapter 2, we study the 1-cent-per-ounce sweetened beverage tax in Cook County, the largest tax (in terms of population affected) of its kind in the United States and the only tax revoked to date. We find that the tax significantly decreases sugar purchases while active and has no lasting effects after the tax is revoked. We find that the tax has the largest sugar-reducing effects for high consumers of regular soda and those who live far from the border of the taxed jurisdiction. We weigh the welfare consequences of the tax by estimating the cost of living increase and find that each gram of sugar reduced cost 3.5 to 6.6 cents. In Chapter 3, I examine the effects of the 2008 Economic Stimulus Act payments on nutrient purchases. I find that households with less than two months of income in savings increase total calories purchased in the month following receipt of the stimulus payment. Interestingly, the composition of the increased calories is not representative of the pre-stimulus nutrient bundle. Households greatly increase sugar purchases and do not increase fiber or protein purchases. I do not find evidence of sustained changes in nutrient purchases.

Download or read book Essays in Applied Microeconomics written by Jianfeng Xu and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: