Essays In Applied Microeconomics And Networks
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Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Daire McCoy
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Daire McCoy and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with categories.
Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Jan Sebastian Nimczik
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Jan Sebastian Nimczik and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with categories.
Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Jan Sonntag
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Jan Sonntag and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
This dissertation revolves around two wider topics: social norms and production networks. The first chapter investigates a specific modern-day case study where social norms are leveraged in the fight against online hate speech to shed light on how norms shape political behavior more broadly. Using machine learning techniques, I show that speaking out against hateful views is an effective way of deterring further hate speech. The mechanism that most likely explains this effect is that vociferous contradiction in fact serves as a form of non-monetary punishment that raises the salience of a social norm. The second chapter focuses on the crucial role of image concerns in explaining the effect of social norms on behavior. While there are now plenty of studies showing that image concerns affect people on average, we still know very little about which individuals specifically drive that effect. I introduce a novel laboratory experiment designed to fill this gap. It generates an individual-specific measure of image concern, shows that there is substantial heterogeneity even in a small laboratory sample, and investigates how it correlates with other social preferences. The final chapter of my thesis focuses on production networks and in particular on vertical integration. Vertical integration give rise to anticompetitive behavior or indeed be a motive for it. I discuss one such mechanism, called vertical foreclosure, by which vertically integrating firms disrupt the supply of critical inputs to competitors. I leverage novel production network data to identify mergers and acquisitions between vertically related firms and show taht these mergers affect the supply chains of their rivals, which I interpret as evidence for foreclosure.
Essays In Applied Microeconomics And Networks
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Author : Nils Christian Wernerfelt
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2016
Essays In Applied Microeconomics And Networks written by Nils Christian Wernerfelt and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016 with categories.
Chapter 1 focuses on the recent dramatic shift in attitudes toward LGBT individuals in the U.S. and the accompanying rise in the number of Americans who have openly come out. We develop a model of stigma with Schelling-style tipping dynamics. Regions may be stuck in equilibria with low LGBT support and few openly gay individuals. These equilibria can be escaped via trigger events, that by causing even a small number of individuals to display their support for LGBT causes, can cause more individuals to come out, leading to more support, etc. We then evaluate our model with a large, online archival dataset on the timing of coming out decisions and public displays of support for LGBT causes for several million Americans. Using state-specific shocks to each, aggregate network data, and instrumental variables, we show how increases in LGBT support lead to elevated coming out rates in highly connected areas, and vice-versa. Chapter 2 studies a recent hypothesis that posits maternal vitamin D levels during pregnancy may affect the probability the fetus later develops asthma. Employing two large-scale studies, we test this hypothesis using a natural experiment afforded by historical variation in sunlight, a major source of vitamin D. Specifically, holding the birth location and month fixed, we see how exogenous within-location variation in sunlight across birth years affects the probability of asthma onset. We find highly significant evidence in both datasets that increased sunlight during the second trimester substantially lowers the subsequent probability of asthma. Finally, Chapter 3 is an evolutionary game theory paper about population structure. We provide a general, modularity-based framework for studying evolutionary games on structured populations under 'weak selection' that includes many previously known results as special cases. Our framework helps to show how these past disparate results are connected, and we exploit this insight to develop a general method for quantifying in closed form the effect of population structure on evolutionary dynamics. We illustrate our framework by proposing and solving a new model that generates a simple rule for the evolution of cooperation on endogenous dynamic networks.
Essays On Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Kristijan Gjorgjevik
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2017
Essays On Applied Microeconomics written by Kristijan Gjorgjevik and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2017 with categories.
This dissertation consists of three chapters that develop and implement economic models to analyze modern problems in Industrial Organization and Labor Supply. In the first chapter, I extend the standard BLP model (Berry et al. [1995]) to account for capacity constraints in a network and evaluate the welfare effects of the 2013 merger between American Airlines and US Airways. I show that including capacity as a constraint in the profit maximization problem that airlines face generates better out-of-sample predictions and leads to different policy implications. In particular, I find that the merger increased consumer surplus by 1.5-1.7%, while the benchmark model could predict it to have decreased by as much as 4.5%. In other words, ignoring capacity constraints could lead regulators to erroneously believe that this merger harmed consumers. I find that, on average, the merger increased the variable profit margins of airlines by 0.3-0.4%, and American Airlines' by 2.5%. I develop and implement an approach for ex-post merger evaluation that could be useful in antitrust legislation.In the second chapter, I extend the theory of efficiency wages (Shapiro and Stiglitz [1984]) to incorporate employer-sponsored health insurance. I develop sufficient conditions under which the Affordable Care Act increases efficiency wages. In particular, if the Affordable Care Act succeeds, at least in part, in inducing employers to provide health insurance and individuals to self-insure, then wages will rise after its implementation. I suggest that the Affordable Care Act may provide efficiency wage subsidies towards the welfare-maximizing wage level, and numerically show the existence of regions where this is the case.In the third chapter, I extend Mirrlees' theory of optimal taxation (Mirrlees [1971]) to include endogenous job search. I use a public-use microdata file on the Canadian labor force to calculate the optimal, revenue-neutral federal tax rates. The results are highly sensitive to the level of inequality aversion chosen for the social welfare function. The optimal tax rate schedule is hump-shaped in income.
Essays In Networks And Applied Microeconomic Theory
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Author :
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2014
Essays In Networks And Applied Microeconomic Theory written by and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2014 with Business networks categories.
This thesis contains three papers which examine the role of networks and social structure in different modes of socio-economic interactions. The first chapter focuses on purely competitive strategic bilateral interactions - contests. I analyse situations in which agents, embedded in a network, simultaneously play interrelated bilateral contest games with their neighbours. The network structure uniquely determines the behaviour of agents in the equilibrium. I also study the formation of such networks, finding that the complete k-partite network is the unique stable network topology. This implies that agents will endogenously sort themselves in partitions of friends, competing with members of other partitions. The model provides a micro-foundation for the structural balance concept in social psychology, and the main results go in line with theoretical and empirical findings from other disciplines, including international relations, sociology and biology. The second chapter is joint work with my supervisor Fernando Vega-Redondo. We study a competitive equilibrium model on a production network of firms, identifying the measure of centrality in the network that determines the profit of a firm, and network structures that maximize social welfare. The significant part of this chapter focuses on how the network mediates the effects of revenue distortions on profits of firms and social welfare. The results are that the effects of distortions propagate both upstream and downstream through the network. The centrality of the affected firm determines the magnitude of the downstream effect, and the upstream effect is determined by the intercentralities of suppliers of the affected firm. Increasing the density of the network by adding links has a non-monotonic effect on welfare. Adopting a more complex production technology can increase but also decrease the profit of a firm, depending on the network structure; while finding a new buyer will always increase the profit of a firm. In the third paper I analyse the interaction between formal legal enforcement of cooperation and the role of reputation in a heterogeneous population. By choosing to cooperate, even when the quality of the formal institution is not high, an agent signals that he has high work ethics, thereby earning reputation as a better match for future interactions. When there is reputation benefit, the welfare-maximizing quality of the enforcement institution is generally not the one that maximizes cooperation. Depending on the distribution of types in society, the effect of the increase in quality of enforcement on cooperation can be crowded in or crowded out by reputation concerns. When the institutional quality is determined endogenously, the equilibrium quality of the institution will generically be higher than the optimal quality.
Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Rina Na
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2019
Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Rina Na and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2019 with categories.
Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author :
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2010
Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2010 with categories.
The first essay of this dissertation explores the role of congressional politics in environmental law enforcements in the United States. It examines if and to what extent the political affiliation of a representative politician matters for the enforcement of the Clean Air Act (CAA); in particular whether the affiliation of a representative politician to a particular party results in a higher/lower level of enforcement in his/her constituency. The period of 1989 to 2005 is considered. The analysis shows that political processes at the local, state and federal level did matter for facility level enforcements. By and large, the Republican politicians tended to reduce facility level inspections compared to their Democrat counterparts and the magnitude of such reduction marginally increased with the seniority of the Republican politicians----a finding that has important policy implications. As a result the political affiliation of a politician emerges as a key instrument for environmental enforcement in the emissions equation. The second essay studies the potential issue of contagion in individual honesty (or, dishonesty). When an individual believes that peers are predominantly untruthful (or, truthful) in a given situation, is he/she more likely to be untruthful (or, truthful) in that situation in absence of monitoring, social sanction and reputation formation? The analysis employs an asymmetric information deception game patterned after Gneezy (2005) and reaches at the conclusion that individuals are heavily (partly) contagious when they believe that peers are predominantly dishonest (honest). The conclusion sheds some light on one of the many individual level root causes as to why the world is bipolar in the distribution of corruption (with most countries are either highly corrupt or highly honest). The third essay discusses the complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles usage and the construction of the network of roads in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. With the expansion of roads, communication between two destinations became smoother, faster and more convenient and in turn attracted more and more people to use motor vehicles as a medium of communication. We empirically investigate how the expansion of the network of roads resulted in the diffusion of motor vehicles. We plan to empirically explore the impact of the diffusion of motor vehicles usage on the expansion of the road network in our future work. The complementarity that existed between the diffusion of motor vehicles and the expansion of roads in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century has important policy implications for today's developing countries that do not have a well constructed network of roads.
Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Hao Teng
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2018
Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Hao Teng and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2018 with Children categories.
"This dissertation develops and applies new techniques to measure the causal effects in observational data. Chapter one investigates the effect of online social networks on consumer behavior. A key challenge is that social network formation is endogenous. Thus, it is hard to distinguish the impact of the social network itself from the impact of the factors leading to the formation of the network. I attack this identification problem using a strategy that exploits social network friendship variation within groups of individuals with similar characteristics. Specifically, I use data from the Yelp Open Dataset to estimate the causal effect of social network friendship on restaurant choices. I apply a machine learning technique to classify individuals into groups based on a high-dimensional vector of characteristics. Using the variation in social network friendship within these groups, I find that compared to non-friends, social network friends are 67 percent more likely to visit the same restaurant within a year. Additional exploration of the heterogeneous effects suggests that this social network effect is stronger for newer users and much weaker for chain restaurants or when a friend's rating is negative (i.e. less than median). The second chapter studies the effect of children's time allocation on their skill development. The work is jointly written with Gregorio Caetano and Josh Kinsler. While there is broad agreement that a significant amount of skill acquisition and development occurs early in life, the precise activities and investments that drive this process are not well understood. In this paper we examine how children's time allocation affects their accumulation of skill. Children's time allocation is endogenous in a model of skill production since it is chosen by parents and children. We apply a recently developed test of exogeneity to search for specifications that yield causal estimates of the impact time inputs have on child skills. We show that the test, which exploits bunching in time inputs induced by a non-negativity time constraint, has power to detect endogeneity stemming from omitted variables, simultaneity, measurement error, and several forms of model misspecification. We find that with a sufficiently rich set of controls, we are unable to reject exogeneity in our most detailed production function specifications. The estimates from these specifications indicate that active time with adult family members, such as parents and grandparents, are the most productive in generating cognitive skill. The last chapter presents my work in the field of education economics and is jointly written with Richard DiSalvo and Josh Kinsler. We use a new approach to estimate the typical effects of school and school district policy changes that directly target suspension reduction, using public national data from the Office of Civil Rights over the period 2000 to 2014. Due to the absence of comprehensive national data on official school policies, we attempt to infer likely policy changes by identifying large, abrupt jumps in reported OSS rates. We study the characteristics of schools and districts that are more likely to have engaged in these "apparent policy changes," finding that, after controlling for baseline out-of-school suspension rates, schools and school districts with a greater share of black students are more likely to engage in abrupt increases in suspension and less likely to engage in abrupt decreases. Then, we use these apparent policy changes as instruments in a difference-in-differences framework, estimating the average impacts of changes in OSS rates when they are achieved through policy changes. We study effects on school test scores, school district graduation rates, and city-level juvenile arrest rates. We estimate that aggregate out-of-school suspension rates have effects on test scores that are comparable to previous literature: roughly, a 10 percentage point decrease in OSS rates translates into a 0.02 to 0.04 standard deviation increase in test scores. Estimated effects on dropout and arrest rates are very imprecise."--Pages viii-x.
Essays In Applied Microeconomics
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Author : Arman Khachiyan
language : en
Publisher:
Release Date : 2022
Essays In Applied Microeconomics written by Arman Khachiyan and has been published by this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2022 with categories.
This dissertation contains three essays studying topics in applied microeconomics. The first chapter is a co-authored paper in which we use daytime satellite imagery and convolutional neural networks to model economic growth at the neighborhood level. In the second chapter, I use this model to examine the spatial distribution of residential impacts from fracking. The third chapter investigates methods of measuring skill distance between occupations and proposes a new method which matches patterns of observed occupational transition. Each chapter uses unconventional data sources and machine learning techniques to contribute to central questions in labor economics research and policy. In the first chapter we apply deep learning to daytime satellite imagery to predict changes in income and population at high spatial resolution in US data. Our model predictions achieve R2 values of and 0.32 to 0.46 in decadal changes, which have no counterpart in the literature and are 3-4 times larger than for commonly used nighttime lights. Our network has wide application for analyzing localized economic shocks. One such application is my second chapter, which studies changes in total neighborhood income and population in areas near fracking extraction and shale reserves. My microspatial approach identifies that fracking exposure as far as 20 miles away leads to a 2 percent decline in neighborhood income. The spatial gradient and associated mechanisms of this effect indicate that it is driven by local industrialization rather than direct environmental externalities. Examination reveals margins of policy and labor conditions which attenuate the observed impacts. In the third chapter I show that a regression framework generates a novel, empirical occupational skill distance norm which is disciplined by observed occupation switching patterns. This approach relieves key limitations of existing measures such as linearity and symmetry. It also allows for an analysis of which skill dimensions relate to the portability of human capital, and which do not. Implications for existing results on skill portability are discussed, along with immediate policy applications on employee adjustment costs.