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Chapter 1: Financial frictions amplify the portfolio balance effect of QE. A costly state verification friction increases output growth by between 0.13 - 0.41 percentage points and increases inflation between 6 - 18 basis points more than the model without the friction. I find that overall that the Federal Reserve’s second round of Large-Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPII) boosts output between 0.51% - 1.62%, which is the equivalent of a 83 - 278 basis point cut in the Federal Funds rate. Investors who arbitrage between long term government debt and corporate debt create a Portfolio Balance Channel in that the effects of QE spill over to the overall cost of corporate borrowing. This long term maturity preference of investors increases output growth by between 0.4 and 1.27% points, and inflation between 20 and 64 annualized basis points more than the model without this channel. Chapter 2: From 2000-2006 US house prices and mortgage credit grew substantially. Simultaneously, the relative cost of mortgage credit fell – particularly for privately securitized mortgages – suggesting the importance of credit supply factors. This chapter explores two candidate (credit supply) shocks: an increase in the inflow of global savings into the US, and innovations in the securitization of mortgage credit. I model a two-layered mortgage market. This generates a novel balance sheet effect: changes in aggregate mortgage credit quantity are linked to changes in mortgage spreads via the interaction of financially constrained commercial banks and mortgage securitizers. Innovation in securitization matches mortgage credit market dynamics by directly relaxing the securitizers’ financial constraint. Conversely, the inflow of global savings leads to a counter-factual increase of mortgage spreads through the balance sheet effect. Chapter 3: In this chapter I show that the existence of unregulated financial institutions (“shadow banks”) generates overborrowing (relative to the socially optimal level) in competitive equilibrium. This is because borrowers fail to internalize that an additional unit of borrowing, when the financial sector is well functioning, has adverse effects on the credit conditions they will face if a crisis arises. The social planner therefore has a motive to intervene to reduce borrowing in good times so as to limit the severity of a crisis. The discretionary planner’s optimal allocation can be decentralized either using borrower based instruments or via regulation of financial intermediaries. The optimal regulation of commercial banks is pro-cyclical.

K-12 educational outcomes are a powerful reflection of social opportunity, both by meaningfully predicting adult wellbeing across measures like health and income, and by encapsulating the breadth of factors that contribute to a child's preparedness, ability, and opportunity to learn and persist in school. In this light, the persistent deficits in educational outcomes experienced by individuals from traditionally disadvantaged identity groups and classes reflect systemic failures to meaningfully address the numerous shortcomings of education and social policy to create equal educational opportunities for all students. The three papers that comprise this dissertation aim to promote more equitable education and social policy by contributing valuable insights into three vital areas of policy that substantively shape the educational opportunities and outcomes of students in the United States. In the first, I extend the existing literature on how air pollutants can contribute to educational inequality by measuring the association between students' proximity to hog farms, their feces lagoons, and fecal fertilizer spraying, and educational outcomes in North Carolina. In the second, I examine the most important school-level resource for student achievement -- teachers -- and how the processes by which students are assigned to classrooms enables the disproportionate assignment of lower performing, nonwhite, and low-income students to less effective teachers within their schools. And finally, I examine districts' proposed spending of federal COVID-19 relief funds, what differences in spending strategies existed for these extremely flexible dollars, and what potential equity implications may exist for student academic learning recovery in the wake of the pandemic. Collectively, these papers contribute new knowledge in three important areas of education and social policy and foreground several promising future research directions by which greater educational equity and equality of social opportunity can be promoted. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Chapter 1 is The Effect of Honors College Participation on Student Outcomes. Honors education refers to programs for high achieving students at U.S. post-secondary institutions. These programs provide high achieving students benefits such as the ability to enroll in exclusive courses with small class sizes, to live in special dorms, and to enroll in classes earlier than non-honors students. These changes to a student's college experience may change their academic outcomes in ways that concern students and policymakers. Results in most prior research on the effect of honors program participation on academic outcomes may be biased by unobserved differences between students in and not in an honors program. This paper addresses these unobserved differences by studying an honors college that uses GPA admissions cutoffs. The Michigan State University Honors College admits all students in the top 10% of the freshmen fall semester GPA distribution of each non-honors college. I use a regression discontinuity research design to compare outcomes of students above and below the cutoffs, and attribute differences in outcomes to differences in honors college participation. I find that participation in the honors college reduces the time for students to get their first degree and increases the probability that first-generation college students will graduate from MSU. However, the honors college has an insignificant effect on most outcomes for most groups I check, so the few significant findings may be due to random chance and doing many significance tests. Chapter 2 is How Low-Income Expectations Affect Student Loan Repayment Plan Choice: Survey Evidence from College Seniors. Income-driven repayment plans lower required payments for student loan borrowers when their income decreases. This helps to reduce student loan defaults. Despite universal availability, only a minority of student loan borrowers in the U.S. are in an income-driven repayment plan. In this study, I test whether a student's choice of repayment plan is related to their expectations of earning a low income. Using an information experiment in a web survey, I create two groups of college seniors with an exogenous difference in low-income expectations. I find that respondents who see the major specific income information believe they, on average, have a higher probability of earning a low income. However, those respondents are not any more likely to choose the income-driven repayment plan. I conclude that students' repayment plan preferences are not strongly related to their expectations of earning a low income. This may be due to students caring about things other than minimizing monthly payments when choosing a repayment plan. Chapter 3 is The Effect of Test Score Performance Labels on Postsecondary Educational Outcomes: Evidence from Michigan. Standardized test scores and the labels associated with those scores provide students and their parents with highly credible information about a student's academic achievement. This information could cause students and their parents to change their beliefs regarding a student's academic ability. This may then consequently change the student's future educational choices and thus their future educational outcomes. In this chapter I use administrative data on Michigan students to look at the impact of receiving different labels summarizing a student's performance on standardized tests on a student's post-secondary educational outcomes. I use a regression discontinuity research design to compare students who have similar test scores but who receive different summary labels. While some of my estimates are significant, almost all lack robustness to using another bandwidth and I am likely to find some spurious effects given the large number of estimates in this chapter. I conclude that I do not find evidence of a large effect of performance labels on postsecondary outcomes. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation consists of three essays in the economics of education. The first essay estimates the impact on women's educational outcomes from having a higher percentage of female peers. Leveraging quasi-random variation on the gender peer composition of STEM majors in a higher education vocational institution, I show that women benefit from having higher percentages of female peers. Specifically, a ten percentage point increase in the proportion of women in a STEM major cohort has a statistically significant positive effect on female students. It decreases female dropout rates by 9.6% and increases GPA by 0.05 standard deviations. The evidence suggests peer effects are mediated by the gender of the instructors. As female students have fewer female instructors, the effect of having more female peers intensifies. The second essay evaluates a randomized control trial intervention that gave information to high-performing students on their performance relative to other students. The results show that women and men were affected differently by the intervention: effects for women with high self-confidence are higher than the effects for men in the same group. For high-performing women who have low self-confidence in their math ability, the probability that they apply to any major increases and the selectivity of their choice of major-university also increases. The increase in application probability comes from an increase in applications for health majors. The third essay describes and explores the STEM gender gap in higher education enrollment and application. The paper focuses on how the STEM gender gap varies depending on students' socioeconomic status (SES). We show that the gender gap in STEM enrollment among top-performing Chilean students is larger for low-SES students than high-SES students. Low-SES men enroll in STEM majors 3.7 times more than low-SES women, while high-SES men enroll in STEM majors 2.4 times more than high-SES women. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Chapter 1: In response to tightened budgets and concerns about higher education costs, governments have introduced rules to limit the use of publicly funded aid, particularly at for-profit colleges. In this paper, we use an event study framework to estimate how tuition, enrollments, and loan use changed at for-profit colleges that became in-eligible for California's state grant aid program. Typical schools reduce tuition by 6 percent relative to unaffected colleges, indicating that the majority of the aid subsidy was captured by schools. In contrast, a subset of schools close to a federal eligibility threshold maintain or increase tuition. These results indicate that the Bennett hypothesis holds for targeted aid decreases in the for-profit sector. Chapter 2: The role faculty demographics play in undergraduate major choices is often presumed to be important, especially in the conversation about improving minority representation in STEM fields, but limited evidence exists on this phenomenon. In this paper, I consider how postsecondary faculty racial composition may influence major selection across demographic groups using a panel of student and faculty counts by race for large public universities in the state of Texas from 1998-2011. I do not find evidence of a racial role-model effect in this environment, and the null effects are estimated with sufficient precision to rule out practically large effects. Although there is growing evidence of other benefits to matched student-teacher characteristics, changing faculty composition alone is not a reliable path to induce changes in undergraduate major representation. Chapter 3: Current methods of cost effectiveness analysis implicitly assume zero spillovers among social ties. This can underestimate the benefits of health interventions and misallocate resources toward interventions with lower comprehensive effects. We discuss the implications of social spillovers for program evaluation and document the first evidence of causal spillovers of health behaviors between spouses by leveraging experimental data from the Lung Health Study (smoking) and COMBINE Study (drinking). We find large decreases in spousal substance use from treatments with a therapy component, which reduces the incremental cost effectiveness ratios of some treatments. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

Across three papers I study how differences in the quality and quantity of classroom instruction contribute to differences in what students learn in school. The first two papers focus on teachers--specifically what gives rise to differences between teachers in student learning. The third paper focuses on the quantity of instruction time students receive. The results are immediately relevant to both ongoing education policy debates about teaching quality and the day-to-day management of a large workforce. First, in paper one, I study the effects of a labor-replacing computer technology on the productivity of classroom teachers. In a series of field-experiments, teachers were provided computer-aided instruction (CAI) software for use in their classrooms; CAI provides individualized tutoring and practice to students one-on-one. In math classes, CAI reduces by one-fifth the variance of teacher productivity, as measured by student test score gains. The smaller variance comes both from productivity improvements for otherwise low-performing teachers, but also losses among high-performers. The change in productivity partly reflects changes in teachers' level of work effort and teachers' decisions about how to allocate class time. Second, I study whether and how teachers' assigned job tasks--the basic instructional practices they are asked to use in the classroom--affect the returns to math skills in teacher productivity. The empirical results demonstrate the value distinguishing between workers' skills and the job tasks to which those skills are applied, as in Acemoglu and Autor (2011). I use data from a randomized-trial of different approaches to teaching early-elementary math, each approach codified in a set of day-to-day tasks for teachers; the data include a baseline test of each teacher's math skills--knowledge of math concepts, procedures, and pedagogy. Teacher productivity, as measured by contributions to student math test score growth, is increasing in math skills when teachers are asked to follow conventional "direct-instruction" practices which rely on teachers explaining and modeling math rules and procedures for their students. The relationship is weaker, perhaps even negative, when teachers use newer "student-led" practices. The difference in productivity is pronounced for the high-skilled (top-tercile) teachers where the difference between direct-instruction and student-led is 0.13-0.16 student standard deviations. Additionally, assigning teachers to use student-led practices reduces the total variation in productivity by one-third or more compared to direct-instruction. Finally, for students whose math skills lag expectations, public schools often increase the fraction of the school day spent on math instruction. Studying middle-school students and using regression discontinuity methods, I estimate the causal effect of requiring two math classes--one remedial, one regular--instead of just one class. Math achievement grows much faster under the requirement, 0.16-0.18 student standard deviations. Yet, one year after returning to a regular one-class schedule, the initial gains decay by as much as half, and two years later just one-third of the initial treatment effect remains. This pattern of decaying effects over time mirrors other educational interventions--assignment to a more skilled teacher, reducing class size, retaining students--but spending more time on math carries different costs. One cost is notable, more time in math crowds out instruction in other subjects. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

As the primary transmitter of advanced skills and incubators of new knowledge, colleges and universities play a crucial role in modern economies. In the U.S., the higher education sector consists of a diverse set of institutions. Public, private non-profit, and private for- profit organizations coexist in this market. Although large research universities constitute what we usually think of as higher education institutions, the vast majority of colleges and universities do not follow the model of the research university. Some are two-year institutions with Associate's degrees as their highest degree offering. Some are Baccalaureate institutions offering undergraduate education only. Some are Master's universities who offer some graduate instruction but do not engage in research as much as research universities do. Unlike traditional firms that rely on sales revenue to cover their costs, many colleges and universities rely on external funding from the government and private donors. Like other non-profit institutions, many of them have large amounts of endowment funds that general investment income to support the institution. Given the diversity of organizations in this sector, how well do conventional economic theory describe their behavior? Do non-profit and for-profit institutions face the same incentives? How does the profit status affect the behavior of the university? What is the role of endowments in higher education finance? How does the performance of the endowment affect the real operations of the university? Are instructions at two-year and four-year colleges of similar quality? Is it wise for some students to start in two-year colleges and transfer to a four-year college rather than starting in a four-year college directly? These are the questions I attempt to answer in this dissertation. Chapter 1 investigates whether for-profit and public community colleges respond differently to increases in demand for occupational education. I exploit a regulatory change, which broadened the scope of practice for dental assistants (DAs) and led to significant in- creases in DAs' wages and employment. In response to this change, for-profit universities substantially expanded their DA programs, whereas most community college DA programs maintained their existing size. Moreover, community colleges that charged a high premium for the DA program expanded their DA programs, whereas those that did not charge a premium downsized their DA programs. These results are consistent with a for-profit sector that maximizes profits and a public sector that sets capacity to balance its budget. Chapter 2 studies how universities responded to the large and negative financial shocks to their endowments induced by the Great Recession. Exploiting variations across universities in the relative size of their investment losses during the Great Recession, I found sharp contrasts among Doctoral, Master's, and Baccalaureate Universities both in how they responded to the endowment shocks and in how their students fared after the Great Recession. In response to large, negative endowment shocks, Doctoral Universities cut down on instructional expenses and reduced faculty and staff of all types; Baccalaureate Colleges cut down on administrative and supportive expenses and reduced non-tenure-track instructors and staff; Master's Universities reduced research expenses and size of the tenure-track faculty. Meanwhile, Doctoral Universities cut student financial aid and admitted fewer low-income and Hispanic students. Master's and Baccalaureate institutions also admitted fewer low- income students. Most notably, the negative endowment shocks led to significant reductions in student persistence and graduation rates at Doctoral and Master's Universities, while having no such effects on Baccalaureate Colleges. As the tuition and living expenses of four-year colleges continue to rise, spending the first two years of college at a community college and transferring to a four-year college has become a more cost-effective way to obtain a university degree. In Chapter 3, a joint paper with Zach Brown, we examine the labor market outcomes of transfer students relative to students who attend a four-year institution directly in the United States. We find a large negative effect on wages driven by selection on unobservables. Instrumental variable estimates using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study imply a 27% reduction in wages from attending a two-year college conditional on eventually attending a four-year institution. This is true regardless of whether we control for four-year college quality. Since students who obtain a bachelor's degree have no reason to reveal their transfer status to employers, this is evidence that college quality has important implications for labor market returns independent of signaling effects. We also find some evidence that the negative effect of transferring is largest for women as well as students at the lowest and highest ends of the ability distribution. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

The Economics of Education is a field that deals with an education system that is funded and administered at different levels. For example, states provide funds for public universities, schools get funding from local taxes, and experimental designs deal with different administrative levels (e.g. school, district, state). The existence of different levels in the educational systems raises interesting questions. Therefore, this thesis studies positive, normative and methodological questions that arise from the level design of education systems. First, an interesting question is how different education systems interact with each other. Regarding this positive question, the first thesis chapter looks at the interaction of public universities at the state level. In particular, it estimates the effect on in-state tuition rates of interstate Tuition Reciprocity Agreements (TRAs) that allow students from out-of-state to get in-state tuition rates. The results suggest that TRAs increase tuition rates and education quality. Therefore, market integration and quality competition would explain a part of the "always increasing tuition" phenomenon in higher education. The second chapter of the thesis studies the normative question of optimal taxation on opportunity inputs. In particular, the chapter uses tools from the Optimal Taxation literature and introduces a Social Welfare Function with equal opportunity concerns. The theoretical results suggest that equal opportunity concerns imply taxation on opportunity inputs. The optimal linear scheme includes an important transfer of resources to school districts. However, the transfer of resources is taxed away when private/local funding of education increases. Therefore, the results support the normative principle of redistribution of local school district revenue, when society has equal opportunity concerns. Finally, the third chapter addresses some issues of experimental research. In the education literature, experiments usually take place at the school or district level, which counteracts the preference of researchers for covariates balance. That preference has resulted in researchers using different re-randomization schemes (constraints on the treatment allocations allowed). The re-randomization schemes improve the efficiency, but researchers have struggled to understand the implications of re-randomization. As such, the paper clarifies the implications of re-randomization and suggests a re-randomization scheme that preserves asymptotic normality -a key property for statistical testing. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]

This dissertation discusses three important topics in regional economics. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between state tax policies and major economic outputs. Using system GMM approach and panel data from 50 U.S. states between 1977 and 2012, this paper estimates effects of average tax rate on the growth of gross state product (GSP), state total employment, and state personal income (SPI). The results indicate that increasing taxes negatively affects state economic activities, state employment growth is more vulnerable to tax increase than GSP growth, and tax effects do not exhibit a significant trend over time. This paper also finds that increasing business taxes is harmful to job growth, especially for states with high stocks of human capital. Chapter 2 offers a new perspective from the local labor market to investigate how inequality affects local social mobility. Using U.S. county-level intergenerational mobility data, I establish a local labor market framework with interregional migration as an influential factor for the distribution of employment opportunities. I examine how such migration affects U.S. social mobility and find that the net-migration inflow negatively affects local social mobility and factors likely to intensify competition in the local labor market are associated with less mobility. Children with disadvantaged backgrounds are more likely to suffer from low mobility in places with more population inflow, more in-commuters, and a slower job growth. I also find places with lower social mobility tend to benefit less from exogenous demand shocks in the labor market, suggesting the pro-employment policies may not help elevating local social mobility. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between charter school proliferation and fiscal distress of local school districts, using data of local school districts in Ohio from 2010 to 2017, I adopt an Instrumental Variable approach to investigate the possible scenario that the rapid growth in charter school enrollment could be caused by fiscal distress of school districts. The results suggest that the inadequate funding from the state government leads to a significant increase in charter school enrollment. Students could be left with no better options but choosing charter schools over failing local public schools, especially for those in rural school districts in Ohio.

This dissertation presents three empirical studies on topics in labor market and globalcommodity prices. The first chapter analyzes how consumption, spending and labor market decisions vary across the life-cycle, and their implications for the aggregate economy. The second chapter discovers the dynamic adjustments of 49 world commodity prices in response to innovations in the nominal and real shocks, and the third chapter reveals how commodity prices are affected by information from the news in high-frequency trading.The first chapter studies the effect of aging on service consumption quantity and pricein the United States. In particular, I ask, do older households consume more service goods? Can aging explain the rise of service price? I investigate the impact of age profile on service consumption and service price in the U.S. using household survey data and metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) level variations, respectively. The results show that after controlling for household income, as people age, they consume progressively more health insurance and medical services and less food away from home. Furthermore, there is a positive correlation between service price and old-age dependency ratio1 in the long run across MSAs. I then build a two-period two-sector OLG model with an education entry cost to explain these results. In this model, age affects service price through two channels: 1) on the demand side, labor markets with older populations tend to demand more services; 2) on the supply side, the education friction would cause worker mobility from the service sector to the manufacturing sector, which further increases the service price.The second chapter is a group project with Professor Hyeongwoo Kim. We studydynamic adjustments of 49 world commodity prices in response to innovations in the nominal exchange rate and the world real GDP. After we estimate the dynamic elasticity of the prices with respect to these shocks, we obtain the kernel density of our estimates to establish stylized facts on the adjustment process of the commodity price toward a new equilibrium path. Our empirical findings imply, on average, that the law of one price holds in the long-run, whereas the substantial degree of short-run price rigidity was observed in response to the nominal exchange rate shock. The real GDP shock tends to generate substantial price fluctuations in the short-run because adjustments of the supply can be limited, but have much weaker effects in the long- run as the supply eventually counterbalances the increase in the demand. Overall, we report persistent long-lasting effects of the nominal exchange rate shock on commodity prices relative to those of the real GDP shock.The third chapter is a group project with Yifei Sheng and Zijing Zhu. To uncover thenews impact on the price of WTI crude oil futures, the third chapter applies supervised and unsupervised machine learning algorithms to conduct news sentiment and topic analysis. With the assumption that the crude oil futures market is efficient enough to respond quickly to new information, this chapter obtains high-frequency prices and news from the Bloomberg terminal. Using results from logistic regression and K-means clustering, this chapter defines the positive score and topic for each news article as inputs for the final logistic regression. The regression results show that the "World Crude Oil" news is more positively correlated with price increase than other topics. Moreover, the "WTI Crude Oil" news has the highest correlation with the price increase as the positive score increases.

This thesis contains four essays on the economics of organized crime and the empirical analysis of social networks. The first chapter provides a review of the recent economic literature on the impacts of organized crime on elections, and on public policies. Politicians indeed represent a major target for criminal organisations as they shape political decisions and policy implementation. The review discusses two central challenges characterising the literature, namely the measurement of organized crime and its potential endogeneity. The second chapter argues that higher electoral competition may reinforce the position of politically active criminal organizations, which can endorse politicians in exchange for favors. The paper formalizes this intuition and test it on Italian electoral data, using the 1991 electoral reform as an exogenous source of variation in electoral competition in one of the two branches of the Parliament. A series of triple-difference and differencein-differences estimates suggest that, after the reform, mafia-prone areas reported higher vote shares awarded to the party traditionally supported by criminal organizations and a larger dispersion of votes across candidates of the same party. The third chapter applies Network Analysis (NA) to study the interactions between criminal organisations and the wider society by analysing the connections between mafia members and the political, economic and social elites (e.g., politicians, public officials, policemen, entrepreneurs) in Sicily, the homeland of the Sicilian mafia. The analysis is based on a novel network dataset built by encoding information coming from the archive of the Italian Anti-mafia Commission, describing relationships of collusion and exchange of favours. So far, the application of NA has been limited to the relationships within criminal networks. This paper moves a step further as it also considers the interactions between mafia members and individuals belonging to the social, political and economic elites. The study analyses the "topological" role of mafia bosses, and shows that mafia bosses strategically position themselves in the social network as an interface between the criminal and the legitimate world. Finally, the fourth chapter studies peer effects in the consumption of cultural activities by exploiting a unique individual-level longitudinal dataset on daily museum visits made by cardholders in the metropolitan area of Turin, in Northern Italy, between 2012 and 2019. The underlying peers' structure is represented by a network in which cardholders are connected on the basis of information about the exact time and location of their visits.

Fundamental to Economics is an understanding of how individuals make decisions when constrained. Individuals must decide over what to consume and how much of it on a daily basis: from which goods to buy to how much to donate to a charity or how much time should be spent in leisure. At the root of all those decisions is the hypothesised utility function and the underlying preferences it represents. These preferences, their stability and their formation, are the focus of this thesis. The first two chapters take a structural choice-revealed preference approach to analyse social preferences. The third chapter seeks to understand when preferences begin to emerge and affect economic decision-making. Whilst these papers are disparate in their contexts and techniques, they are unified by a primary focus on the underlying role preferences play in economic decision-making. Chapter 1: This chapter examines how preferences depend on context. More specifically, it focuses on whether preferences over donation decisions to a not-for-profit remain stable as the visibility of a donation and the relevance of the not-for-profit changes. This chapter finds that preferences over donations are context-dependent, depending on the degree of anonymity of the not-for-profit. The data come from a laboratory experiment of a dictator game with a 3x2 treatment layout - on the first dimension the degree of visibility of the donation changes, and on the second dimension the relevance of the not-for-profit to the prospective donor changes. In contrast to most experimental papers, the observed data are not directly analysed; instead the data are used to partially-identify the underlying parameters of the participants. The impact of context on donation decisions is directly tested by measuring how the average estimated parameters shift as context changes. Increased donation visibility increases the emphasis agents place on both utility derived from altruism and utility from social image or pressure. This evidence is stronger when agents are assumed to be comparing their choices to their expectations of others' choices, rather than comparing choices to the more common 50-50 social norm. Chapter 2: In contrast to the first chapter, this chapter looks both at underlying preferences and how individuals learn over the preferences of others. Examining a sequence of one-shot Prisoner's Dilemma games, this chapter ultimately reveals individuals to be pessimistic in their beliefs over others and envious in their social preferences. The data in this chapter comes once again from the laboratory, but instead focuses on the finitely-repeated Prisoner's Dilemma. It adopts the same structural revealed-preference approach used in the first chapter to evaluate models of learning - from Bayesian updating to a pessimistic, asymmetric updating rule - and underlying preferences. In fitting with perceptions of Economics as the 'dismal science', it is evident that most individuals are pessimistic in their beliefs over the actions of others: they will negatively update beliefs over the likelihood of facing an agent who cooperates when they observe an agent who defects, but do not update beliefs positively in the face of cooperation. When their own underlying preferences are examined, it is evident that a combined model of inequality aversion and altruism rationalise most behaviour; somewhat counter-intuitively, though, those who cooperate the least are not, on average, the most self-interested but the most inequality-averse, suggesting that envy could be the primary driver of defection in the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Chapter 3: Despite deviating from the previous chapters substantially in context and techniques used, this chapter retains the same focus on underlying preferences. In this instance, however, the focus is on the emergence of underlying preferences and norms as a basis for economic decision-making. This chapter uses a unique dataset on labour choices made by children at KidZania London, which provides a real-world, closed economy for children. Over 130,000 children are observed making fully-incentivised labour decisions from as young as four on school visits to KidZania between 2015 and 2017. Using this data, augmented with data obtained from the Department of Education and the Office of National Statistics, the chapter answers the following research question: what drives economic decision-making during childhood and what patterns likely persist into adulthood? By observing labour market decisions made in a closed economy with all individuals facing an identical choice set, any divergent trends must be due to underlying norms and preferences. As this is the first time the data are being analysed, a series of stylised facts are first established: i) girls earn more than boys, ii) girls earn more by working longer, whereas boys earn more per minute on average, iii) girls opt for female-dominated occupations and boys for male-dominated occupations and iv) gendered patterns of behaviour are both early in onset (from age 4) and persistent in effect (with patterns observed through to age 14). These stylised findings are supported by modelling of occupational demand, suggesting that gendered preferences or norms are internalised from an early age and persistently drive economic decision-making from age four. The effect of socioeconomic status is weaker and less persistent than the effect of gender. Gendered preferences or norms are unique in both the strength of influence and their early onset.

The following document outlines the research projects that I have conducted so far and would like to undertake in the upcoming academic year. The goal is to answer the following overreaching research questions: What information is relevant to voters when it comes to getting information about malfeasance, and do voters update to 'informative' signals? There has been a recent number of studies focusing on the relationship between information and accountability. Most recently, EGAP's Metaketa project has shown that information tends to have little or no effect on party preferences or voting behaviour. Several explanations have been proposed to understand these findings. Furthermore, there is significant discrepancy between survey experiments and field experiments. This research project would seek to contribute to the field by providing empirical evidence on the different stages of the information chain. This thesis is structured as a three-papers work. Paper 1 is a field experiment conducted in cooperation with the Comptroller General Office (CGO) in Chile and the local NGO Chile Transparente during the municipal elections held in May 2021. This paper looks at whether voters update in response to information about malfeasance at their local government. The study was conducted just before the municipal elections in 116 out of 345 communes in Chile. Paper 2 focuses on the importance of informational architecture and how it affects the way citizens assess the reliability and trustworthiness of the information provided. A key component of Bayesian belief updating is that the signals should be informative and provide digestible quantitative information. This paper seeks to explore this premise by using an innovative methodological approach. I conducted an adaptive design experiment, which has rarely been implemented in the field of political science and compare its results with those of a conventional static experiment. Paper 3 is a methodological paper that aims to assess the reliability of a Randomised Item Response Technique (RIRT) to measure the prevalence of corrupt behaviour at the local level. This paper is mainly motivated to explore unobtrusive and relatively new indirect survey techniques to measure the prevalence of corrupt behaviour. The purpose of conducting this technique is to yield both population and individual-level measures of experienced-based corruption. I also provide evidence of bias-corrected estimates due to inattentiveness. For the viva, I report population and individual-level estimates obtained from the RIRT.

This dissertation is comprised of three distinct papers covering topics in appliedmicroeconomics and applied econometrics. The first paper addresses a common problem faced by empirical researchers wishing to estimate Markov regime-switching models. For these models, testing for the possible presence of more than one regime requires the use of a non-standard test statistic. The analytic steps needed to implement the test of Markov regime-switching proposed by Cho & White (2007) are derived in detail in Carter & Steigerwald (2013). We summarize those implementation steps and address the computational issues that arise. A new Stata command to compute the regime-switching critical values, rscv, is introduced and presented in the context of empirical economic research. This paper is joint work with Douglas Steigerwald, and has previously appeared in the Stata Journal (Bostwick and Steigerwald, 2014).In the second paper, I address a question in the field of economics of education: that is,whether college students use their choice of major as a signal of unobserved productivityin the labor market. I propose a model of postsecondary education in which major fieldof study can be used by individuals to signal productivity to employers. Under thissignaling model, I show that geographic areas with high access to elite universities resultin fewer science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors among lower ability students at non-elite colleges. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics' Baccalaureate and Beyond survey, I find evidence that is consistent with the signaling model prediction, specifically a 2.3-3.7 percentage point (or 16-25%) decrease in the probability of choosing a STEM major among lower ability students in areas with greater access to elite colleges. This paper has previously appeared in Economic Inquiry (Bostwick, 2016).In the third paper, I analyze an unexpected consequence of a highly debated educationpolicy. Many school districts are now considering delaying high school start times toaccommodate the sleep schedules of teens. This paper explores whether such policychanges can have an impact on teen car accident rates. This impact could functionboth through a direct effect on teen sleep deprivation and indirectly through changes tothe driving environment, i.e. shifting teen commute times into the high volume, "rushhour" of the morning. I find that, during the morning commute hours, any potentialeffect stemming from avoided sleep deprivation is offset by the effect of shifting teendriving into rush hour, so that a 15 minute delay in high school start times leads to a21% increase in morning teen accidents. However, by focusing on late-night accidents, Ialso find evidence of a persistent sleep effect. By decreasing teen sleep deprivation, a 15 minute delay in school start times leads to a 26% decrease in late-night teen accidents.

This dissertation consists of three chapters in international economics and macroeconomics. The first chapter examines the impact of agents' educational and occupational choices on the relationship between trade and inequality. The second chapter studies the consequences of multinational banks' organizational choices for the international transmission of shocks. The third chapter considers the importance of geography for the structural estimation of real consumption growth. The first chapter revisits a classic question in international economics: what is the impact of trade on inequality? Empirically, I document that trade is positively associated with the share of high-skilled hours worked but not with the skill premium. This is true in both the short and long run. To explain this puzzle, I develop a tractable general equilibrium model featuring skill bias in productivity and endogenous educational and occupational choices. Quantitatively, I show the relevance of this model for the case of China's entry into the WTO and use the model to examine the impact of counterfactual trade policies. The second chapter (with Stefania Garetto and Jos\'e L. Fillat) examines how multinational banks' regulatory structures affect the transmission of financial shocks across countries. In the case of the European sovereign debt crisis, we demonstrate that the U.S. branches of foreign parent banks were more likely to contract their lending and lose deposits in response to stress in the parent country than were the subsidiaries of foreign parents. We develop a structural model of global banking, consistent with stylized facts about the banking industry. We quantify this model and use it as a laboratory to examine the impact of counterfactual regulatory regimes. The third chapter (with Jonathon P. Lecznar) studies the role of geography when incorporating product entry and exit into structural methods for estimating real consumption growth. We document three new facts related to geographic differences in consumption: (1) consumers in separate markets buy different products, (2) a product's market share varies geographically conditional on relative price, and (3) product variety growth and its cyclicality vary geographically. Quantitatively, we find that focusing on changes in aggregate product variety overstates real consumption growth by 2.75 percentage points.

The first chapter of this dissertation argues that privatization and other policy changes in China during the past decade had a direct effect on input prices. This is in contrast to most previous work, which instead emphasized the effect of privatization on productivity. I illustrate the importance of taking such differences into account by estimating the parameters of a static firm competition model using the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database and calculating a measure of total factor productivity for each firm out of those estimates. The results of my analysis indicate that the percentage difference in productivity between private and state-owned firms may be overestimated by as much as 135 percentage points if the difference in input prices is not properly addressed. The second chapter of my dissertation establishes empirical support for such a difference in input prices by constructing a dynamic structural model of privatization, firm heterogeneity and industry evolution, and estimating its parameters using the Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database. My estimates of the model confirm many well documented institutional features about China's reform, including "grasp the large and let go of the small" policy, easy access to credit for state-owned enterprises (SOEs), and selection for privatization according to firms' probabilities of success. In addition, the estimated structural model provides the basic tool for policy simulations and enables us to see the effects of hypothetical policies, for example “grasp the small and let go of the large” and “removing SOEs’ easy access to credits”. In the last chapter, I study the effect of privatization of state-owned enterprises in China, focusing on not only the effect of privatization on a firm's productivity, but also its effect on market output allocation. I use the method proposed by Olley and Pakes (1996) to find improvements in average market productivities for all industries in China. This growth in productivity resulted from enterprises becoming more productive, but not from more efficient output allocation within the market. Private firms are proven to be more productive than state-owned enterprises in all industries, but privatization itself improved firm efficiency only for some industries.

This PhD thesis consists of a short introduction followed by three papers. Each paper examines a different topic within the broad area of modern monetary and international macroeconomics. The first paper, Product Quality, Measured Inflation and Monetary Policy, written in collaboration with Alex Rodnyansky and Alejandro van der Ghote, fills a gap in the New Keynesian literature, which has largely ignored product quality adjustments. This paper proposes a tractable model of a New Keynesian (NK) economy where, in addition to the standard price and quantity channels, firms are able to endogenously adjust the quality of their products in response to shocks. This new model, featuring endogenous product quality changes subject to adjustment costs, nests the canonical New Keynesian model, which is frequently used as the starting point for policy analysis by central banks. In this framework, endogenous product quality choices imply a larger slope than the traditional NK Phillips curve as, for a positive productivity shock that lowers marginal costs, quality-adjusted prices decline because firms are simultaneously able to increase the quality of their products. Allowing firms to adjust product quality also amplifies the economy's response to productivity shocks. Following a positive productivity shock the natural real interest rate decreases by more as households look to smooth a larger increase in consumption, which is boosted by a rise in both the quantity and quality of the goods they consume. As a result, monetary policy responds by altering the nominal interest rate by more for a given productivity shock. Model misspecification of imperfectly observable quality adjustments matters more for macroeconomic stabilization than the mismeasurement of those adjustments. With no misperception of product quality by the monetary authority, the principles for optimal monetary policy are, nonetheless, unchanged as the product quality extensions to the canonical NK model preserve divine coincidence. My second PhD paper, The Impact of Large-Scale Asset Purchases on Wealth Inequality examines the relationship between monetary policy and household wealth inequality through changes in the size and composition of the central bank's balance sheet. I focus on the impact on household wealth inequality through the financial portfolio rebalancing channel of monetary policy transmission. I construct a theoretical model that has multiple assets (of differing liquidity), banks and heterogeneous agents, who experience idiosyncratic labor productivity shocks. This model is carefully calibrated to reproduce theoretical levels of wealth inequality which match those observed in the US Survey of Consumer Finances. I use the model to replicate the changes in the Federal Reserve's balance sheet which arose in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 financial crisis. This shows that an expansion of the central bank's balance sheet can materially alter the distribution of wealth, causing inequality to increase, while even extreme changes in the composition of the central bank's balance sheet (for example through maturity extension) have little effect. This arises as central bank purchases of longer term assets cause households to hold additional liquid financial wealth. Liquid financial assets are unevenly distributed in the population, and hence wealth inequality measures increase. When the model is calibrated to match the Federal Reserve's Large Scale Asset Purchases (LSAPs) from 2008 until 2014, wealth inequality increases by 3.8%, as measured by the Gini coefficient, suggesting this channel leads to a significant increase in wealth inequality. The final PhD paper, The Rise of Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson, begins by documenting two stylised facts. Firstly, over the past 70 years the positive cross-country relationship between aggregate consumer prices and real output per capita has strengthened (i.e. a rise in the Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson effect), as demonstrated using data from the Penn World Tables. Secondly, border frictions have increased over the same time frame, with international borders effectively becoming wider and an increasing failure of the Law of One Price (LOOP). I construct my own dataset of city-level relative prices using national sources across five continents to document the increasing failure of the LOOP. I then use a two-country endowment model with a domestic distribution services sector to construct an equilibrium failure of the LOOP. An increase in the relative size of the distribution services sector can simultaneously explain both stylized facts, while the standard explanation (a higher share of non-traded goods) may only explain the first. Furthermore, I extend the model to include production by monopolistically competitive firms, before solving and calibrating the model to closely replicate the two stylised facts.

This dissertation contributes to the literature on the politics of social assistance in Emerging Market Economies. It builds upon existing theoretical frameworks across several academic fields and offers empirical evidence on the influence of politics in the expansion and distribution of social assistance programs. Paper 1 provides a novel contribution to existing political explanations of social assistance expansion by theorizing and testing how electoral competition and contentious politics mediate each other's effect on social assistance spending on a global scale. The analysis finds this election-contention-nexus to influence social assistance spending in Middle-income countries in particular. Paper 2 offers a longitudinal analysis of the influence of the interaction of protests and electoral competition on social assistance in Turkey to uncover how the election-contention-nexus plays out at the national level. In addition, due to the available micro-data, it assesses the targeting of programs to characterize who receives benefits as a response to political factors. The results suggest that this co-occurrence can lead to higher levels of coverage of social assistance benefits among the poor in Turkey. Paper 3 introduces a framework to examine differences in the distributional logic used by governments across different social assistance types to provide a systematic understanding of political distribution of benefits that goes beyond aggregate spending or single flagship programs. The results suggest that the main benefit types that are used for political purposes in Turkey are meager cash and in-kind benefits that I classify as poverty mitigating social assistance. Further, the type of challenging party is found to have differential effects on the distribution of social assistance programs. Lastly, Paper 4 examines the role of federal politics in India to explain stark differences in unmet demand for the world's largest public works program. It finds that state-level party strategy and party alignment across levels of government are important factors that can explain unmet demand in the program. Further, it highlights that one benefit can be utilized by many political actors across levels of governments for different purposes. Surprisingly, district-level economic or political dynamics are not found to influence rationing rates of the public works program.

This thesis contains three papers studying the behavioural response of firms, households and investors in emerging economies to changes in expectations and uncertainty. The first paper investigates how economic agents change their consumption and investment behaviour to news about unanticipated changes to power sector plans by exploiting a novel dataset for the identification of news shocks in a vector- autoregression. While there is an immediate expectations-driven GDP response to a surprise capacity addition in OECD economies, this positive output effect is absent in developing and emerging countries. Firms and households in developing countries respond to failed power projects by immediately reducing investments and are also subjected to lower economic growth as a result relative to the pre-disappointment period. The second paper examines regulatory uncertainty as a barrier affecting infrastructure service investments and quality in Brazil. Exploiting a quasi-natural experiment for identification, it finds that electric utilities partially shielded from uncertainty significantly increase their irreversible investments in electricity distribution infrastructure. This response is qualitatively consistent with optimal behaviour as prescribed by real options theory. The third paper uses an autoregressive distributed lag model and finds that sovereign and corporate bond yields in emerging economies exhibit a long-run relationship that is not explained by economic conditions, firm fundamentals, bond properties, or external factors affecting emerging countries. The paper identifies perceived transfer risks by investors as the key channel. Investors' perceived transfer risks lead corporate and sovereign bond yields to co-move and generally converge. The introduction and conclusion of the thesis further explain common themes.

This dissertation consists of three papers. In each paper, I use applied econometric methods to study the factors affecting educational investments in low- and middle-income settings. The findings provide insights into how to better support students and families in the decision-making process from a policy perspective, facilitating them in making informed choices and realizing the full potential of the investments. In the first paper, I examine high school students’ expectations about their intended college majors in rural China. I find that students hold a high level of uncertainty about their choice of college majors. Using a randomized controlled trial, I demonstrate that access to information on disciplinary knowledge and career opportunities of college majors increases students' certainty about their choice by 0.15 SD. However, the intervention reduces female students’ likelihood of choosing a science major by 10 percentage points. I provide evidence that the effect is not driven by students’ perceived ability in math. The findings suggest that preferences for college majors are formed as early as the first years of high school, and gender-sensitive approaches are needed to cultivate interests in science majors. The second paper explores how parents make decisions regarding the number of tutoring hours for their children. Through a field experiment conducted among Chinese middle school parents, we demonstrate that parents' investment decisions are affected by their beliefs about their peers' investment levels, and that they often hold biased beliefs about those levels. When provided information about the actual distribution of tutoring hours invested among their reference groups, parents adjust their investments accordingly. Our heterogeneous analyses suggest that one driver of investment in private tutoring is the fear of falling behind. The third paper estimates the effect of an economic crisis on school choice in Colombia. We find suggestive evidence that a one-percentage-point increase in recession intensity (or decrease in GDP growth rate) leads to a decrease in the number of test takers by 0.7 percentage points in private schools compared to the years before the recession. We also find a 1.2 percentage-point difference in the effects of private and public schools on the number of test takers. Our estimates suggest that families adjust their educational investments after a recession by withdrawing their children from private schools. Such changes could have important implications for students in both types of schools.

Household earnings and infant mortality surged in opposite directions in the United States between 1940 and 1950, with incomes growing rapidly and infant mortality declining. This paper seeks to establish the extent to which income gains contributed to this decrease, and how the changes in wage equality played a role. Using OLS and IV estimates, I find that increases in county-level incomes are positively associated with increases in infant mortality, suggesting a strong presence of indirect effects or omitted variables. I further find that changes in income inequality impact infant mortality at a significant level. This paper adds to the current body of literature examining the relationship between equality and health measures, as well as research investigating the causal mechanisms of the rapid decline of infant mortality in the mid-twentieth century.

How do government regulatory policies shape economic output and consumer welfare? What are the costs and benefits of government regulations? These two fundamental inquiries are at the core of my research. In this dissertation, I assess the consequences of government regulatory policies in the healthcare sector from the following three perspectives: (1) How do product quality and safety regulations shape the development of new (medical) technologies? (2) Can regulations targeting administrative requirements influence the accessibility and provision of medical services? (3) To what extent do historical occupational licensing regulations for the healthcare workforce affect consumer welfare? In my job market paper “Product Safety Standards and Technological Innovation: Evidence from the 1968 Radiation Control,” I explore the effects of product safety standards on the speed and direction of medical innovation. Product safety regulation has been a widely adopted policy tool throughout history. Debates typically center around the trade-off between safeguarding consumers and stifling the development of new products. In this paper, I study how stricter safety standards influence the nature and speed of medical innovation by drawing evidence from the 1968 Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act. For the first time at the federal level, this Act mandated enforceable performance standards to control the radiation risk of electronic products. I find that in response to this act, firms developed new technologies reducing the risks of diagnostic X-ray medical equipment (an increase of 64.2% in patent count) as a key channel to lower compliance costs. I also document an increase of a similar magnitude for innovations (by 72.1%) representing new radiation-generating medical devices and show some suggestive evidence for the complementarity of risk mitigation and new technologies using radiation. I rule out a number of alternative explanations for these findings, including the introduction of the CT scan in 1972. In the second chapter, “Cutting Red Tape: Administrative Simplification and Treatment Capacity,” I investigate the impact of regulating prior authorization on the provision of substance abuse treatment services. Excess administrative expenses impose a strain on the U.S. healthcare system. Yet, little is known regarding how these administrative requirements affect facilities' provision of medical services. I empirically assess this question by drawing on the staggered adoption of state laws restricting prior authorization (PA) requirements for substance abuse treatments (SAT) in commercial health plans. Using multiple datasets, I find specialty care facilities are more likely to provide low-intensity (i.e., outpatient) SAT services while decreasing the provision of high-intensity ones (i.e., intensive outpatient, partial hospital, inpatient). I further corroborate supporting evidence for one plausible mechanism: lowering administrative hassles can expand both facilities' and health providers' treatment capacity. To capture welfare implications, I document the fact that imposing PA restrictions can reduce the suicide rate due to SUD issues. This paper thus highlights a novel source of costs associated with healthcare administrative processes: beyond imposing direct paperwork costs, they substantially restrain organizational treatment capacity. In the third chapter, “Veterinary Care Regulation and Livestock Production: Evidence from the Progressive Era,” I explore how regulating veterinary practice shaped a key dimension of agricultural development: livestock production. Exploiting the staggered adoption of state-level licensing laws for veterinary care in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, I document the fact that stricter licensing requirements led to a significant surge in heads of livestock (i.e., horses, mules, milch cows, and swine) per acre of farmland. I further provide some suggestive evidence for one plausible mechanism: during the Progressive Era, stricter veterinary care regulations mitigated informational asymmetries in specialized medical service, thereby altering the input choices in agricultural production. My findings thus highlight the broader effects of labor market regulation on consumer outcomes and provide important implications for ongoing debates regarding the value of occupational licensing.

This dissertation focuses on how transportation and information networks change the geographic distribution of economic activity. The first and second chapters examine the geographic distribution of patenting in the nineteenth century United States. The third explores the impact of the rollout of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the early twentieth century on voting behavior. In Chapter One, I examine the relationship between patenting activity and transportation access, using a newly collected panel dataset at the county level spanning the nineteenth century United State. I find a robust, statistically significant, positive effect of increases in local transportation access on patents per capita. The effect is large --- patents per capita double over the twenty years following introduction of the railroad. I ask if this increase is due to inventors responding to larger markets afforded by transportation improvements. I find modest evidence that market access explains the increase in patent activity, but most of the relationship seems to be explained by other variables correlated with transportation access. The second chapter proposes a novel way to study technology diffusion, investigating how transportation changes information absorption. Using digitized patent texts, I measure whether any given patent mentions previous, novel technologies within a particular window of time. The arrival speed of these new ideas is only weakly related transportation improvements; expansions of the transportation network disproportionately benefit the most develop places. Together, these two chapters suggest that the positive effect of transportation access on patenting is due to transportation forming a nexus that encourages local agglomerations, but leave the question of the overall impact of lager transportation networks on innovation unclear. Chapter Three focuses on the how mail delivery spread new information, studying the rollout of Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the early twentieth century. Using a newly constructed panel data set, the analysis shows that voters in communities receiving more RFD routes distributed their votes to more parties; however, there is no evidence of an effect on turnout. RFD shifted positions taken by Representatives in line with their rural constituents, including increased support for pro-temperance and anti-immigration policies. The results only occur in counties with local newspapers, suggesting that the main channel is a lowered cost to voters of acquiring information relevant to political choices.

This article-based thesis aims to study political economy and governance in developing countries through the lens of crime, policing, and politics. Chapter 2 studies the impact of election timing on crime and the nature of law enforcement in a developing country known for electoral violence. Using administrative crime data from India in the 2008-2019 period, I undertake fixed effects and difference-in-differences analyses, and provide detailed and rigorous causal evidence for change in the nature of crime and the composition of policing effort as elections approach. I show that upcoming elections increase crimes against public order while reducing crimes against individuals, such as those related to bodily offences, property, or women. I suggest that these cycles are driven by changes in police behaviour - as elections approach, the police sharply increase preventive activity and the enforcement of crimes related to public order, and reduce the enforcement of other crimes. These changes are consistent both with the multitasking of bureaucrats as well as political incentives for re-election, and contribute to our understanding of the nature of crime, politics, and policing during elections. One in three elected representatives in the lower house of national and state legislatures in India is criminally accused. Using detailed and granular crime data from India, Chapter 3 estimates the impact of politicians with criminal backgrounds on local crime. On one hand, criminal politicians may be elected not despite of, but because of, their ability to control crime and get things done in an environment with weak rule of law. On the other hand, given their criminal backgrounds and political control over local police, criminal politicians may seek to consolidate their rent-seeking interests during their time in office. I use a close election regression dis- continuity design and find that having a criminal politician in office lowers weekly counts of serious crimes by 23.6%, even though the total number of complaints re- mains unchanged. This reduction in crime seems to be partly driven by reduced recording of crime. Further, this chapter suggests that the specific nature of a politician's criminal background matters for outcomes. Chapter 4 focuses on low participation of women in politics, and explores the impact of gender-specific polling stations on turnout. Using data from Pakistan, which has one of the lowest rates of female voter turnout in the world, we analyse the impact of creating separate-gender polling stations for males and females on voter turnout. The results show that separate gender polling stations reduce turnout for females by 2 percentage points on average, and for males by 1 percentage point on average. The results remain consistent after controlling for the role of resources, norms and mobility-related costs. This paper indicates that the policy of separate- gender polling stations does not alleviate gender-based voting constraints, and may in fact, worsen women's access to voting. Together, these three papers improve our understanding of crime during elections, criminal governance, and the participation of women in the electoral process, and contribute towards the literature in the fields of economics and political science.

This thesis contains three papers studying the consequences of labour and credit market frictions on the efficient allocation of resources and business cycle dynamics. A common theme of the three papers is that they focus on markets, where some market elements can be captured well with search frictions. The first paper estimates the extent to which aggregate job creation is driven by non-fundamental noise rather than fundamental news shocks employing maximum likelihood estimation of a DSGE model with search and matching in the labour market. The paper finds noise to play no role in aggregate job creation. Motivated by survey data on income growth expectations and labour market flow data, the second paper develops a mechanism where the information acquisition about idiosyncratic match quality is pro-cyclical. The mechanism, which is integrated into a directed search dynamic block recursive equilibrium model allows for a parsimonious explanation of observed survey data, labour market transition rates and finds counter-cyclical labour market mismatch. The third paper finds that the share of non-performing bank loans in total bank loans can be viewed as a mirror image of capital misallocation in many developed countries. The model developed from this observation shows that search frictions in used capital markets may drive non-performing, as will forbearance incentives. The paper estimates the extent to which changes in forbearance incentives and in the efficiency of used capital were responsible for variation in the share of non-performing loans. The introduction and conclusion of the thesis explain common themes and point to further applications of the content in the papers.

This thesis consists of four self-contained essays in applied microeconomics. The first exploits China's accession to the WTO to investigate the impact on Indian manufacturing firms of improved access to intermediate inputs, and finds a persistent quality-upgrading effect which ripples out across the production network. The second examines the impact of artificial intelligence on hiring and wages in the Indian service sector, using a novel dataset of 15 million online vacancy posts, and finds evidence of direct negative effects within incumbent firms. The third paper explores the impacts on developing countries of robot adoption at home and abroad, drawing on industry- and firm-level robot data from a wide range of countries, and outlines the groups most likely to benefit - and those most likely to lose out. Finally, the fourth paper investigates the sources of observed heterogeneity in VAT pass-through, using reforms across 14 Eurozone countries between 1999 and 2013, and finds important roles for product market regulation and product quality.

This thesis explores the impact of the renegotiation of trade agreements when there is a threat that trade barriers could increase. The thesis addresses the following questions: 1. What is the impact on firm exporting decisions of the trade policy uncertainty generated by the renegotiation of trade agreements? 2. What is the role of a customer base in export dynamics, and does an exporter customer base respond to the renegotiation of trade agreements? 3. How do industries restructure in response to changing economic competition driven by trade agreements? 4. What is the impact of exchange rate movements (driven by the renegotiation of a trade agreement) on exporter prices and quantities, and are the effects heterogeneous across firms? 5. How important are firms that trade goods internationally for the UK economy and how could these firms respond to the future renegotiation of trade agreements following Brexit? The second chapter (joint with Meredith Crowley and Lu Han) introduces the concept that the renegotiation of a trade agreement introduces uncertainty into the economic environment. In June 2016 the British electorate unexpectedly voted to leave the European Union, introducing a new era in which the UK and EU began to renegotiate the terms of the UK-EU trading relationship. We exploit this natural experiment to estimate the impact of uncertainty associated with trade agreement re-negotiation on the export participation decision of firms in the UK. Starting from a model of exporting under trade policy uncertainty, we derive testable predictions of firm entry into and exit from a foreign market under an uncertain `renegotiation regime'. Empirically, we develop measures of the trade policy uncertainty facing firms exporting from the UK to the EU after June 2016. Using the universe of UK export transactions at the firm and product level and cross-sectional variation in `threat point' tariffs, we estimate that entry in 2016 would have been 5.0% higher and exit 6.1% lower if firms exporting from the UK to the EU had not faced increased trade policy uncertainty after June 2016. In the third chapter (joint with Davide Rigo) we investigate the role of customer base in export market dynamics. First, we provide evidence that exporters grow in a foreign market by accumulating customer base. Second, we show that customer base can explain up to 30% of the growth in a destination market. Third, we explore potential mechanisms and find no evidence that exporters use customer specific price dynamics to attract new customers or expand existing customer relationships. Fourth, we explore how exporters adjust customer base in response to changes in market access by exploiting the trade policy uncertainty associated with the renegotiation of the UK-EU trade relationship and Sterling depreciation following the Brexit referendum. We show that French exporters in 2016-2017 were less likely to enter into exporting to the UK and incumbent exporters acquired a lower number of new buyers in the UK compared with the other European countries. Overall our results indicate that customer base is an important margin for export market growth and provides another margin that firms may adjust in response to changing market conditions. The fourth chapter shows that the rise in import competition from China following China's accession to the World Trade Organization contributed to the decline in UK manufacturing activity post 2000. A significant proportion of this decline in manufacturing activity is driven by firms switching their industrial activity out of manufacturing production and towards services. In particular, firms switch into business services such as research and development and wholesale and retail. This paper also shows that the speed of the transition across industries is fast, with the majority of the employment and turnover effects occurring in the first few years. This is primarily driven by the largest firms, as the switching effect on the number of firms is substantially smaller. The final chapter explores why the value of UK goods exports increased following depreciation of Sterling after the Brexit referendum. This paper shows that most of the response was initially driven by an increase in prices, although export quantities did also increase. The largest exporters were most responsive to the depreciation, increasing both quantities and prices more than smaller exporters. The paper also provides new facts on the importance of firms engaged in international trade in goods for the UK economy. Only 3% of UK firms are engaged in international trade in goods, yet these firms account for over 30% of employment and over 50% of UK turnover. The top 1% of goods exporters are pivotal in shaping UK export patterns as they account for 70% of exports, 5% of employment, and 12% of turnover.

This article-based dissertation uses administrative data to examine questions about inequality, taxation, and election administration that are important topics of study in public economics and political science. The thesis is composed of three original papers that explore different questions, explained below. Chapters 1 and 5 supplement this work by providing a brief introduction and conclusion respectively. In Chapter 2, I develop a new methodology to estimate income inequality for developing countries. The leading existing estimation technique explained in Alvaredo, Atkinson, Piketty, Saez and Zucman (2016) is ill-suited to conduct top income adjustment in low tax compliance countries. The new estimation technique addresses this limitation by matching corresponding income quantiles in survey and tax data to conduct top income adjustment. I implement both these methodologies using a combination of administrative data of all tax returns filed in Pakistan from 2008 to 2016, and nationally representative surveys. The results firstly show the existing technique breaks down in Pakistan's low tax compliance context while the method proposed by this paper produces more robust estimates. It secondly shows that income inequality in Pakistan remained high and stable from 2008 to 2016. In Chapter 3, I analyze the effectiveness of a tax broadening tool used in a low tax compliance, developing country context. The Board of Revenue in Pakistan regularly gave out extensions to the tax filing deadline under the assumption that time is a binding constraint to filing behavior. I conduct the analysis by using administrative data of all tax returns filed in Pakistan from 2007 to 2017 and combine this with data extracted from official government circulars containing details about deadline extensions. The results firstly show that deadline extensions are associated with individuals and unincorporated businesses delaying the filing of their tax returns by 88% and 70% of the extension duration respectively. Secondly, extensions reduce compliance of individuals and unincorporated businesses with the final extended deadline by 4.5 and 1.1 percentage points respectively. Finally, extensions do not encourage tax filing behavior and hence are ineffective in expanding the tax base. Chapter 4 explores the impact of gender-specific polling stations on turnout. Several countries, including Pakistan, have created separate polling stations for males and females with the aim of increasing female voter turnout. The paper uses an administrative dataset of the polling station-level results from Pakistan's recent general election in 2018 to estimate the impact of separate gender polling stations on voter turnout. The results show that separate gender polling stations reduce voter turnout for females by 2 percentage points on average, and for males by 1 percentage point on average. Together, these three articles use administrative data to contribute towards the existing literature in public economics and political science. Chapter 2 contributes towards the literature on income inequality, Chapter 3 towards tax enforcement, and Chapter 4 towards political participation. The thesis also shows how administrative data can be used to answer large policy-relevant questions.

This thesis contains three essays on household finance focusing on household consumption and savings decisions. The first paper studies household demand for flexibility in debt repayment. Based on evidence from a natural experiment, I find that few households apply for flexibility in debt repayment, although all households weakly prefer flexibility in a standard consumption- savings model. The paper studies how self-control problems and a desire for commitment, as well as inattention and inertia can explain observed household behavior. The second paper untangles reasons for the credit card debt puzzle describing the co-holding of high-cost debt and low-yield assets. I test existing theories for co-holding and provide evidence on the contribution to co-holding of intra-household financial pooling and of anchoring to minimum credit card payments. The final paper studies household heterogeneity in insuring against cohort-level earnings shocks using: (i) investment income flows; (ii) the tax-and-transfer-system; and (iii) credit markets. The insurance mechanisms vary by household socio-economic characteristics captured by housing tenure.

This thesis uses information theory to study policy questions in banking, finance, and industrial organization. It consists of four independent papers. The first paper, “Time Inconsistency in Stress Test Design”, shows that central banks face a time inconsistency problem when publishing bank stress test results. Before a stress test, they want to appear tough as the threat of letting banks fail the stress test incentivizes prudent behaviour. After the stress test, they want to act soft by releasing only partial information in order to reassure financial markets about bank health. The paper characterises an institutional design solution to this commitment problem: a social planner sets the framework within which the central bank communicates. We find that a hurdle rate framework, where all banks are judged to pass or fail relative to a common threshold, is optimal in many settings as it generates intermediate levels of both incentives and reassurance. We show that, in such a hurdle rate framework, stress tests become an informational contagion channel. The second paper proposes a model of imperfect competition in markets with selection and investigates whether imperfect competition mitigates the inefficiency which, in these markets, arises under perfect competition. Focusing on markets with advantageous selection, such as consumer credit markets, we find that no degree of competition can restore the first best efficient allocation. We discuss policy alternatives. The third paper shows that, in markets with adverse selection, tying contracts can prevent unravelling and thus have a substantial positive effect on welfare. We illustrate this effect for two insurance markets. When one characteristic (such as life-expectancy) is hidden information and causes agents to have high expected cost for one product (life insurance) but low expected cost for another (pension annuity), then for tying contracts cost differences partially cancel out. This can prevent unravelling. In the fourth paper, which is joined work, we build on a field experiment, find that some agents increase effort when it becomes more costly, and rationalize this in a signalling model. In the field setting, agents also choose whether to truthfully disclose their effort. The data on this form of strategic communication adds further support to the interpretation that effort choices are driven by signalling motives.

Can Vitamin D deficiency contribute to opioid use? Though seemingly unrelated substances, the two interestingly mirror each other in effects and metabolism. Vitamin D deficiency can lead to weakness, pain, and depression. Both can interact with addiction receptors in the brain. For these reasons, some evolutionary thinkers argue sunlight, the primary source of Vitamin D, may have emerged as the very first addiction. In this framework, modern opioid use could mirror sun exposure, but without the benefits and regulation which Vitamin D provides. Thus, one's natural Vitamin D levels may be very important to explaining their interactions with opioids. This paper parallels previous medical and epidemiological literature attempting to demonstrate how Vitamin D mediates the strength of opioids. Using 2003--2004 U.S. NHANES prescription use, health, and demographic data for individuals aged 20 to 84, this paper measures the impact of Vitamin D deficiency on the propensity of opioid use. A control function approach is used, leveraging milk consumption to relieve endogeneity concerns in previous studies. Unlike previous findings, we do not observe any significant effect from Vitamin D levels.

Medicare Advantage (MA), a private alternative to Traditional Medicare (TM), covers over 50 percent of Medicare beneficiaries and accounts for a similar share of spending (in 2023). The government pays private insurers a monthly amount to offer coverage to beneficiaries. The plans covering most MA enrollees – preferred provider organizations (PPOs), health maintenance organizations (HMOs), and point of service (POS) plans – are also required to maintain provider networks that restrict access to certain providers and meet government adequacy requirements. In paper one, we develop a method for measuring the restrictiveness of provider networks in MA without relying on provider directories. This approach relies on prescription drug event (PDE) data for MA enrollees to identify providers seen by enrollees. Focusing on primary care providers (PCPs) as a high-prescribing specialty, we use a prediction model trained on stand-alone prescription drug plans (PDPs) to estimate the number of providers that would have been seen absent network restrictions, allowing estimation of a measure of network restrictiveness for MA plans. Our findings suggest that MA plans reduced access to PCPs to 60.6% of what we would expect it to be absent network restrictions. HMOs tended to have the most restrictive networks, and rural areas were most affected by network restrictions. When developing provider networks, MA insurers seek to maximize profit while meeting regulatory standards. To make networks attractive to patients, insurers might have to include providers that are differentiated by quality, brand-name, or other characteristics. These so-called “star providers” are those that are difficult to exclude from networks due to market power, potentially driven by product differentiation or other behavior. In the second paper, we build on prior work identifying star providers in other markets, and using claims data, we develop a measure of demand for provider groups among TM beneficiaries. Using this measure, we identify star provider groups, of which 81.04% are in-network for at least one MA plan, compared to 26.3% for others (SMD: 1.31). While these groups had a larger share of beneficiaries than others (5.69% vs 1.14%, SMD: 0.57) (indicating market power), they tended to have a similar number of providers. These findings suggest that there exist provider groups that limit the ability of MA insurers to flexibly modify networks, which may affect how regulators view proposed mergers. Insurers participating in MA must offer benefits at least as valuable as TM, but typically expand benefits beyond what TM offers, and they are required to have an out-of-pocket limit on beneficiary costs. Payment changes might affect the value of these benefits. Reductions in payment might lead to narrower networks or less expansive benefits, for instance. In the third and final paper, we use a one-time reduction in government payments in 2015 to identify the extent to which payments change network breadth, benefits, and/or advertising effort. We find that less than 100% of the reduction is passed through to beneficiaries. 40.6% of the reductions are passed through as less generous benefits while 27.6% are passed through as higher premiums. We find a reduction in zero-premium plans but no effect on advertising effort or network restrictiveness. A major contribution of our analyses is the development of a novel method for measuring provider network restrictiveness, allowing regulators and researchers to evaluate the role of provider networks in affecting access without relying on provider director data. Our results are consistent with prior work suggesting that the MA market is generally non-competitive and that a less than competitive provider market may make it difficult for insurers to modify provide networks.

EGM$^n$: The Sequential Endogenous Grid Method\begin{quote}Heterogeneous agent models with multiple decisions are often solved using inefficient grid search methods that require many evaluations and are slow.This paper provides a novel method for solving such models using an extension of the Endogenous Grid Method (EGM) that uses Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) to interpolate functions on unstructured grids.First, I propose an intuitive and strategic procedure for decomposing a problem into subproblems which allows the use of efficient solution methods.Second, using an exogenous grid of post-decision states and solving for an endogenous grid of pre-decision states that obey a first-order condition greatly speeds up the solution process.Third, since the resulting endogenous grid can often be non-rectangular at best and unstructured at worst, GPR provides an efficient and accurate method for interpolating the value, marginal value, and decision functions.Applied sequentially to each decision within the problem, the method is able to solve heterogeneous agent models with multiple decisions in a fraction of the time and with less computational resources than are required by standard methods currently used.Software to reproduce these methods is available under the \href{https://econ-ark.org/}{\texttt{Econ-ARK/HARK}} project for the \texttt{python} programming language.\end{quote}Structural Estimation of Life Cycle Models with Wealth in the Utility Function\begin{quote}Heterogeneous Agent Models (HAM) are a powerful tool for understanding the effects of monetary and fiscal policy on the economy. However, current state-of-the-art frameworks such as Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) models have limitations that hinder their ability to accurately replicate real-world economic phenomena. Specifically, HANK models struggle to account for the observed accumulation of wealth at the very top of the distribution and lack important life cycle properties such as time-varying preferences, mortality, and income risk. On the one hand, the inability to pin down wealth at the tail of the distribution has been a problem for HANK models precisely because it has implications for the transmission of monetary and fiscal policy. On the other hand, agents in HANK are generally conceived as perpetual youth with infinite horizons and without age-specific profiles of mortality and income risk. This is problematic as it ignores the effects of these policies on potentially more affected communities, such as young families with children or the low-wealth elderly. In this paper, I investigate the effects of both life cycle considerations as well as wealth in the utility on the structural estimation of HAMs. Structural estimation is the first step in evaluating the effect of monetary and fiscal policies in a HANK framework, and my hope is that this paper will lead to better models of the economy that can be used to inform policy.\end{quote}Student Debt and Economic Well-Being during the Pandemic\begin{quote}The Great Recession had a profound impact on American households, particularly those with student debt balances. These households experienced greater financial distress than the average American household. The recent COVID-19 pandemic-induced economic downturn starting in 2020 similarly affected families across the country. However, policymakers implemented stronger measures to alleviate household distress during this downturn, including stimulus checks and student debt payment forbearance for student debt holders. This marked a significant departure from the response to the previous recessions. Therefore, it is crucial to analyze the financial well-being of households with student debt during the pandemic-induced downturn to understand the impact of different approaches to economic downturns. This paper aims to shed light on the effectiveness of these policies and their implications for future economic crises using data from the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) and a propensity score matching design. I find that households with student debt were worse off prior to pandemic but did not fare worse through the pandemic-induced recession than households without student debt. This is different from the impact of having student loan debt during the Great Recession. This paper sheds new light on the impact of the programs used during the pandemic induced recession as compared to previous recessions. \end{quote}

This dissertation studies the impact of public policies in education and labor markets on a range of workers' outcomes, especially disparities in labor market outcomes. I begin by analyzing the effect of education policy on long-term labor market outcomes, and then study the effect of maternity leave on female workers' childbirth decisions in the U.S. Finally, I examine how the recent COVID-19 pandemic has affected the disparity in the labor market.In Chapter 1, I explore the causal effects of single-sex high schools on long-term labor market outcomes using a unique feature of educational policy in South Korea--—the random assignment of students to single-sex versus coeducational high schools. I find that the effect of single-sex schooling on earnings is positive for women but not for men. The effect varies with job experience, increasing by 1.9 percentage points with each additional year of experience. In addition, single-sex schooling affects other labor market outcomes, including women's work hours and job satisfaction. Finally, I use measurements of completed education and job training as human capital accumulation to study potential mechanisms for gender differences in the effect of single-sex schooling.In Chapter 2, we scrutinize the dynamics of job loss and reemployment corresponding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the policy reactions from the different governments using a range of high-frequency data on employment and unemployment from diverse countries: the United States, Australia, South Korea, and Italy. Using the information on demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, we can show how COVID-19 affects the labor market in a social stratification framework that exploits population subgroups sorting different jobs. We find greater declines in employment for young, low-educated, and single individuals in most countries, while the size of impact varies across countries. This decline in employment affects individuals’ employment status in three parts: recently unemployed, absent from work, and out of the labor force. However, the changes in the three-unemployment statuses are different between nations. In addition, this paper shows that the pre-COVID-19 sorting of workers into occupations and industries can explain disparities in labor market outcomes during COVID-19 along demographic lines. This paper finds that the face-to-face index is positively correlated to the recently unemployed, but the remote work index is negatively correlated, which provides a potential channel of labor market disparities results from the pandemic. For example, the youngest group who experienced the largest decline in employment are more likely to have a job requiring face-to-face interaction but not allowing remote work in 2019. Finally, our OLS estimation results show that occupational and industrial characteristics account for a large portion of labor market changes.In Chapter 3, I provide evidence that fertility responses to maternity leave differ by education and type of leave. Identification is based on changes in the opportunity cost of children by the provision of maternity leave. Using NLSY97 data and the single-equation probit model, first, I find that the fertility decisions are strongly correlated to the provision of maternity leave, and the magnitude of the effect is larger for highly educated women than for less educated women. Second, unpaid maternity leave may yield a stronger fertility response than paid maternity leave because of the wage-fringe trade-off. Third, this paper shows that the estimated effect of maternity leave in the single-equation probit model might be subject to selection bias. In bivariate probit models with an instrumental variable, I find no evidence that my single-equation estimates are subject to selection bias for working women with a graduate degree. However, the MLE estimates of bivariate probit models imply that there might be upward selection biases in my single-equation estimates for less-educated women.

As China has experienced massive economic growth since the turn of the century, it has also developed a crisis of inequality. Urban areas reap a majority of developmental benefits, as does eastern China versus western China. This creates a dissonance between the socialist roots of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the reality of ever-increasing socioeconomic inequality. The CCP in turn has put forth economic initiatives such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), with one of its stated purposes being to solve developmental gaps in China’s west. However, the reality of China’s political economy and the actual implementation of these initiatives do not reflect the stated need to decrease inequality. This paper uses the implementation of the BRI in Xinjiang as a case study on who the primary beneficiaries of these initiatives are. This paper finds that, in line with a political economic system, the BRI reproduces inequality and primarily benefits elites (i.e., government officials). Those with political ties and Beijing hukou are the main representatives and workers within BRI bodies. State Owned Enterprises (SOE) dominate the industries that benefit directly from BRI infrastructure projects, such as the Chinese steel industry. Additionally, it is arguable that the BRI’s presence in Xinjiang acts primarily as a method to expand the CCP’s presence in the region and enable social control. As Uyghurs are perceived to pose a threat to China’s ontological security, or the security of states’ self, identity, and sense of continuity in the world, the CCP has taken extreme measures to securitize both Xinjiang and the Uyghur ethnic group. The BRI enables this through both building robust connective infrastructure between China’s east and west and providing a need to “protect economic interests” to justify the mass surveillance and incarceration of Uyghurs and other Xinjiang minorities.

Lately, the debate over various public policies, such as immigration reform and tax policy, has heated up in the United States. This dissertation seeks to explore the different impacts that some of the policy changes have on different groups of people. In doing so, I am able to help better inform policymakers of the possible economic outcomes of future reforms. The first chapter examines the labor market impacts of two state-level immigration policies designed to reduce the presence of undocumented immigrants: E-Verify and "Show Me Your Papers" (SMYP). Using a difference-in-difference strategy, I examine the separate and combined effects of these laws on the employment and wages of likely unauthorized, working-age men and women and the groups of low-skill American workers with whom they are most likely to compete for jobs. I also look at how these laws impact state-level economic outcomes, including industry- specific GDP. I find that immigration reform reduces employment and hourly wages among undocumented men. Immigration reform also results in large, negative impacts on state GDP, especially in industries that rely more heavily on undocumented workers. The second chapter examines the questions of whether consumers respond differently to taxes of different salience levels and if there is heterogeneity in consumer tax salience across income groups and other categorical groups such as age and education groups. I find evidence supporting tax salience theory in the market for alcohol. Additionally, I find evidence of heterogeneity in tax salience effects across different education levels. In particular, more educated consumers are more responsive to changes in sales taxes. The third chapter focuses on the impacts of immigration reform on the children of undocumented immigrants. By comparing siblings in a difference-in-difference approach, I show that DACA, a policy that reduces legal barriers for young undocumented immigrants, increases the educational attainment of potentially eligible youth. Meanwhile, policies such as Alabama HB 56, which increase barriers for undocumented immigrants, reduce the enrollment rates and increase dropout rates for the children of undocumented immigrants.

First essay: This paper studies the impact of Nepal’s 1996-2006 Maoist insurgency on the nutritional status of children. We employ the difference-in-difference (DID) model. The proxy for conflict intensity is killings per thousand population (KPT). The finding of our study is that a marginal increase in KPT decreases the height-for-age (HAZ) of the children by 0.0844. The loss in child health was statistically not significant in both non-poor and poor households. Therefore, the impact of the insurgency on child health is largely driven by the negative effect of the insurgency on Janajaties, irrespective of their economic status. Second essay: This paper studies the impact of the earthquake on the education of rural children. Our study uses a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach. We find that after a year of the earthquake, there is a decrease in the educational outcome of the children. Female children from 16 years old cohort are 23.4 percent less likely to complete secondary school. The earthquake has decreased the likelihood of completing secondary school among the 16 years cohort children from poor households by 17.9 percent and by 28.4 percent in poor 16 years cohort female children. Third essay: This paper studies the impact of Maoist insurgency on girls’ child marriage in Nepal. We use the difference-in-differences (DID) method to estimate the impact of insurgency. Our finding infers that the insurgency decreased the probability of child marriage among the women of age cohorts 15-20 years old. A marginal increase in KPT decreases the probability of child marriage by 3.66 and 4.16 percent among 18 years old and 19 years old age cohorts, respectively. This decrease in child marriage due to insurgency was stronger in non-poor households and urban areas. The decrease in child marriage due to insurgency was experienced by Brahmin and Chettri, Indigenous nationalities, and Dalits.

The dissertation aims to analyze the economic and social consequences of unconventional oil and gas (UO&G) production in the Permian Basin, located in southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. The first paper focuses on the effect of methane reduction regulations imposed by the United States (US) government on the production of natural gas and the drilling of new wells. Specifically, the question asked is “what is the impact of methane reduction regulations on the drilling of new wells and the production of natural gas over a 40-year time horizon?” I develop dynamic optimization in a system dynamic setting to assess the impacts. The simulations suggest that the methane regulations have a small effect (around 1% decline) on production and the number of wells drilled in the basin throughout the time horizon. Further, the total profit declines by 25% to 32%. The second research article examines the impact of oil and natural gas tax revenues on the state of New Mexico’s expenditures on roads, education, and health infrastructure. Implementing a two-way fixed effect model with annual data from 2008 and 2018, I find that UO&G tax revenue does not impact road expenditures whereas health services see about a 1.9% increase in expenditure. For education, the UO&G tax revenue increases its expenditure by 1.8%. The third paper investigates the effect of UO&G activities on road accidents in the New Mexico portion of the Permian Basin. Using monthly spatial data on crashes and well activity in the basin obtained from various government agencies, a Poisson model with fixed effects is employed to study the effect. The findings suggest that while the completion and production periods do not significantly impact accident rates, the drilling stage of well development increases the accident rate by 3%.

Throughout NBA history, there has been discrimination that has been faced by black players. This is not limited to the compensation that black players receive compared to white players. Literature in this are showed a significant amount of discrimination occurring between white and black NBA players when holding player performance constant when looking at the mid 1980s. This changed with later literature, as analyses of the early to mid 1990s found that this discrimination had subsided in NBA contracts. This paper analyzes seasons from the early 1990s through to early 2020s to see whether this change in discriminatory practices holds true. The expected result based on racial progress that has been seen in the United States over time would be that this discrimination would continue to be eradicated form when it initially disappeared in the literature in the mid 1990s. However, this is not what is found in actuality. Instead, there is no significant evidence of racial discrimination in contracts in the mid 1990s, but significant discrimination reappears in the early 2010s and continues to grow with time through the 2021-22 NBA season. When looking for explanations of this phenomenon, attendance is not tied to the racial makeup of the team, and black players actually get drafted earlier based on NBA performance that white players do. As well as this, including popularity and excluding maximum contracts does not eliminate this racial disparity. The only reasoning found in the data in this paper is the influx of foreign players, but this does not come close to eliminating all discrimination, so the end result of heightened discrimination in the last decade is still puzzling.

This work comprises five chapters. Chapter 1 presents an outline of three separate research papers, highlighting their objectives, main findings, and contributions to existing literature. Chapter 2 evaluates the impact of the Right to Education Act on children’s health and cognition in Andhra Pradesh, using the Young Lives data. We exploit the timing of the survey rounds and variations in children’s age in each round for studying the relationship. Chapter 3 studies the impact of the Clean India Mission sanitation program on children’s math and reading test-scores. Using data from the ASER surveys and from the Govt. of India, we employ causal empirical strategies and find positive changes in the outcomes. Chapter 4 examines the positive association between New Mexico’s Pre-K funding and children’s math and reading proficiency rates. For this study, we use county-level yearly data from multiple sources. Lastly, Chapter 5 summarizes the conclusions from the three papers.

In the span of seven years, the United States has switched from being a net importer of LNG to the largest LNG exporter in the world. This is a historic shift in energy markets that has received little attention in the literature despite the persistent and immense effects it has had. The effects of the ongoing energy crisis in Europe only add impetus to the study of energy markets, where the constriction of Russian energy exports has seen the historic entrance of the U.S. as a major energy provider to Europe. Accordingly, this paper seeks to analyse the effect of U.S. LNG exports on global market integration, in addition to the effect of the recent European energy crisis on this integration. This papers thus employs bivariate linear and threshold cointegration techniques to analyse the degree of integration between key European & Asian natural gas prices and oil prices. Results confirm recent findings that European natural gas prices became more integrated during 2016 to 2020 with U.S. natural gas prices whilst oil prices decoupled from U.S. gas prices. However, this paper also finds that when extending the time frame to the present day, these effects appear to reverse. Long-term equilibrium relationships weaken between foreign natural gas prices and U.S. gas prices, while such relationships between oil and U.S. natural gas prices appear stronger than before the U.S. began exporting LNG. Notably, short-term adjustments between U.S. and foreign natural gas prices increase in speed post 2020, indicating heightened price transmission and the potential emergence of a spot LNG market.

Taxation of gasoline is an integral part in modern-day American life, and its regressivity has important distributional consequences for millions of Americans. By using two different methods to impute household gasoline consumption, this paper presents new findings on how the regressivity of gasoline tax in America changed between 1977 and 2017. This analysis identifies a misleading description of the relationship between 1977 vehicle fuel economy and household income presented in an official FHWA report and cited in mainstream economics literature. Specifically, I find that gasoline tax regressivity (as measured by the slope of gasoline tax burden on household income) decreased from 1977 to 2001 and then increased back to 1977 levels in 2009 and 2017. I show that gasoline tax regressivity was stable between 1977 and 2017 because changes to mileage-income and MPG-income profiles offset each other. Since 1977, the positive relationship between annual mileage and household income has weakened, causing gasoline tax to become more regressive. This effect is counterbalanced by a similarly weakening positive relationship between vehicle fuel economy and household income over the decades. The paper briefly discusses several social and behavioral factors that may have contributed to these changes in household vehicle choice and driving behavior, such as the advent of online shopping and delivery services, the filtering effect of vehicle repurchase, fluctuations in gasoline price, and the adoption of hybrid vehicles.

This thesis comprises three papers within the field of natural resource economics in developing countries. In broad terms, this thesis investigates the challenges and opportunities surrounding the macroeconomic management of natural resource revenues in developing economies. It is a mix of theoretical and empirical work covering three distinct but related topics. The first paper, titled "Commodity price shocks, growth and structural transformation in low-income countries", is an empirical investigation of the macroeconomic response of resource-rich, low-income countries to movements in commodity prices. A panel-VAR approach is used to estimate both the dynamic and structural macroeconomic response to global commodity price shocks. The results point to small, but positive, growth and investment responses to commodity price booms. I also find evidence of significant transformation of the sectoral value-added shares in these economies following price shocks, and present evidence of a Dutch disease mechanism at work. The second paper, titled "Surfing a wave of economic growth", investigates whether the geographic determinants of growth extend to natural amenities. It combines data on spatial and temporal variation in the quality of over 5,000 surf breaks globally with data on local economic performance, proxied by night-time lights. The findings document a strong association between natural amenity quality and local economic development. Economic activity grows faster near good surf breaks; following the discovery of new breaks, or the technology needed to ride them; and during El Ni˜no events that generate high-quality waves. The effects are concentrated in nearby towns and emerging economies, and population changes are consistent with tourism. The third paper, titled "Pricing sovereign debt in resource-rich economies", investigates the link between commodity price movements and risk premiums in resource-dependent, developing economies. I develop a stochastic general equilibrium model of a resource-rich economy with sovereign debt and endogenous default risk. I show that the bond price is decreasing in the level of indebtedness and negatively correlated with the oil price. The model can explain a large proportion of the business cycle fluctuations in interest rate spreads in resource-dependent, developing economies. Higher risk-aversion, more impatience, larger oil shares and a stronger correlation between domestic output and oil price shocks all help to explain the key macroeconomic co-movements in these settings.

Why do firms publish science and release open-source software for free? The classical view in economics argues that firms will underproduce innovation relative to the social optimum because they cannot capture the social value available in cumulative ideas. And yet, firms do freely share their innovative knowledge, do so frequently, and do so with dramatic effect (with examples ranging in time from the transistor to the transformer architecture). Why? An influential perspective in the literature is that firms do capture value from this strategy, but they do so elsewhere – controlling the complement, whether through vertical innovation, co-invention, or the presence of unique complementary skills. Yet, while this perspective has impressive explanatory power across a wide range of industries, it fails to explain recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This dissertation therefore empirically examines this innovation strategy in the context of firm involvement in AI research, in search of new explanations. The first chapter of this dissertation observationally studies the impact of firm involvement on foundational scientific research, and, using a special set of “dual-affiliated” researchers located on the boundary of universities and firms, shows that firms can surprisingly have a positive effect on the scientific impact of a researcher’s papers. The second chapter uses a field experiment to estimate the impact of open source software libraries on the productivity of data scientists and illustrate the types of skills necessary for realizing those productivity gains. The final chapter uses the unexpected shift in governance of PyTorch (a leading machine learning framework) from Meta to the Linux Foundation in order to illustrate the importance of technology control rights in understanding why firms get involved in open-source software development. A key theme that emerges from these studies is that open firm innovation at scale (due to digitization) can lead to new possibilities for value capture that can align with value creation.

The education pipeline is characterized by a series of well-defined and extensively documented transitions. From preschool to kindergarten, elementary to middle to high school, and college to work, students at multiple stages of human development experience transitions that shape their downstream outcomes. In this dissertation, I use administrative data and quasi-experimental analytic approaches to examine how people, programs, and policies impact individual outcomes during periods of educational transition. In my first essay, my co-author and I examine how exposure to peers on the school bus influences one's own academic achievement and behavior. We draw from an established literature on peer effects and an emerging literature on neighborhood effects to show that an out-of-school setting like the school bus can meaningfully impact individual performance. By focusing on idiosyncratic changes to the sets of students riding the bus together that result from school transitions and the spatial structure of bus routes, we develop an approach to estimating peer effects that takes advantage of transition data. To estimate bus peer effects, we measure the extent to which changes in the unexplained component of the performance of a student's bus peers predict otherwise unexplained changes in that student's own performance. We estimate our model using a leave-out-student strategy where we measure the effects of bus peers for each student using data only from their peers. Our identifying assumption is that conditional on student, school-by-school-pair, year, and grade fixed-effects, variation in the residual of student performance common to students who ride the bus together is unrelated to factors apart from their bus ride. We report two main sets of results. First, we show that a standard deviation (SD) shift in bus peers' academic performance corresponds to own changes of 0.02 SD from elementary to middle school and 0.05 SD from middle to high school. We also document shifts in behavior ranging from 0.05 SD from elementary to middle school to 0.08 SD from middle to high school. These results demonstrate that out-of-classroom interactions are more meaningful in adolescence and are roughly half the magnitude of comparably estimated school, counselor, and teacher effects. Second, we leverage survey and neighborhood data to show that the effects of social interactions on the school bus are only partly related to students' prior academic performance and that there is little evidence that bus effects are related to survey-based measures of school climate or student engagement. Our results show that social interactions in informal settings may be important in shaping student learning outcomes, highlighting the need for research to better account for the various out-of-school settings in which students participate. In my second essay, I move along the education pipeline to high school, where students grapple with questions related to the transition to college and the workforce. In my high school setting, I examine how access to and attainment of industry-recognized certifications (IRCs) shapes post-high school intentions, postsecondary enrollment, and earnings. IRCs are developed by industry groups or corporations for students hoping to demonstrate preparedness for a particular job or sector. In my sample, I leverage proprietary IRC data that covers a diverse set of industry areas, including business, the arts, and manufacturing. In my setting, students sit for an IRC exam and earn the certification if they obtain a passing score. If IRCs represent a postsecondary signal, then certified students may express interest in four-year college or experience higher enrollment rates. If they represent a workforce signal, then certified students may have higher earnings. I use two analytic approaches to describe the effects of earning an IRC in high school. First, I use matched samples of certified and non-certified students to show that IRC earners are considerably more likely to plan to and actually enroll in a four-year college. Moreover, these same students are considerably less likely to plan to and actually enroll in a two-year college. This result suggests that there is a trade-off on the margin of college type. Second, I leverage arguably exogenous assignment to certification status at the passing threshold to show that an IRC does not impact outcomes for the marginal examinee. At best, I uncover suggestive evidence that the marginal IRC earner is slightly more likely to express an interest to work after high school and delay college enrollment. This joint finding suggests that the marginal earner, in contrast with the average earner, uses IRCs as a workforce signal. I find no evidence through either approach that IRC attainment shapes short-term quarterly earnings. The results suggest that for the average certified student, IRCs constitute a component of the college-readiness portfolio while for the marginal student, IRCs weakly signal intentions to work. In all, the results show that IRC effects are more muted than credential proponents may suggest. Finally, in my third essay, my colleagues and I examine the effects of credential stacking that occurs during transitions between college and work. Credential stacking refers to the practice of earning multiple credentials within a fixed period of time. The vast majority of research estimating returns to credentials focuses on the single degree—whether the associate's, bachelor's, master's, or professional degree. Credential stacking has emerged alongside the demands of employers for workers who can re-skill or up-skill in the face of technological change, the pandemic economy, and demographic shifts. To measure the effects of credential stacking, we leverage statewide administrative data in a state that has emphasized stacking as a strategic workforce initiative. Using decades of postsecondary and labor market data, we use fixed effects approaches with individual time trends to show that credential stackers earn roughly $800 more per quarter than their counterparts who attempt to stack but ultimately do not. Moreover, we show that the benefits of stacking accrue largely to female and non-white stackers, suggesting that credential stacking may be a viable approach to skill development that addresses persistent equity gaps. We also show that credential stackers who pursue a second associate's degree (whether from a certificate or first associate's degree) earn more than stacking by other means, and that stackers in healthcare fields earn roughly twice as much per quarter as the average stacker. Our results suggest that states and institutions continue to pilot and evaluate credential stacking pathways as they pursue approaches to creating broad economic opportunity for adult learners. Taken together, these three empirical studies shed light on factors that shape individual trajectories at critical inflection points. Each paper contributes to an established research paradigm in important ways. New estimates of transition-induced bus peer effects that approach the lower bound of established effects in education (e.g., teacher, leader, or school) suggest that out-of-school contexts matter. Causal effects of IRC attainment on college enrollment and quarterly earnings paint a mixed picture and suggest that claims about the promise of certification for school-to-work transitions may be exaggerated. Finally, returns to credential stacking in the transition between school and work suggest that the practice boosts average earnings and can reduce longstanding equity gaps in the process.

The papers in this dissertation use large-scale administrative US Census Bureau data to understand the consequences of urban sorting for spatial inequality, housing affordability, and the welfare of low-income households. The first chapter (co-authored with Ashvin Gandhi and Valentine Gilbert) presents evidence suggesting gentrification primarily affects low-income renters by changing the characteristics of other neighborhoods in their choice sets. This finding has important policy implications: it suggests that policies promoting citywide affordability (e.g., zoning deregulation) may increase welfare for low-income renters more than policies like rent control which prioritize incumbent renters’ welfare in the short-run. The second chapter (co-authored with Valentine Gilbert) compares the characteristics of residential vacancy chains created by new suburban single-family homes to those created by new urban multifamily housing. Our current results imply that new suburban housing supply has little effect on urban housing affordability or on the welfare of low-income urban households. The third chapter develops and estimates a quantitative spatial equilibrium model to demonstrate how optimal urban economic policy varies based on three sets of parameters that are subject to contentious debate, both popular and academic: parents’ preferences, the technology governing children’s upward economic mobility, and social preferences over children and their parents.

This series of papers focuses on understanding the decision-making processes and incentive systems facing key decision-makers in the U.S. criminal justice system and labor market, as well as how those decisions interact with systemic inequities. Although the primary lens is labor economics, these questions and the tools and theories needed to carefully answer them intersect with behavioral and experimental economics, as well as with other disciplines like psychology and political science. The first chapter examines the distortionary effects of reality TV shows that follow police on police officers’ arrest decisions and on viewers’ attitudes and beliefs about police. Television shows with police officer protagonists are ubiquitous on American television. On these shows, criminals are nearly always apprehended. However, I find that this is a distortion of reality, as crimes mostly go unsolved and police officers infrequently make arrests. What does the omnipresence of this genre mean for the general public’s conception of police, for the practice of policing, and for the communities being policed? In this chapter, I use department-level and officer-level data to find that arrests for low-level crimes increase while departments film with reality television shows. These arrests do not meaningfully improve public safety and come at the cost of the local public’s confidence. I then document that these shows – particularly their overrepresentation of arrests – improve non-constituent viewer attitudes towards and beliefs about the police. I consider the implications for police accountability and criminal justice reform. The second chapter examines whether employers’ beliefs update rationally in response to noisily accurate information about racial gaps in productivity. I find that employers respond to signals based on their own implicit biases and the signals’ consistency with stereotypes. In the canonical economics literature on discrimination, it is assumed that statistical discrimination based on inaccurate beliefs will not persist since agents have clear incentives to update as Bayesians based on accurate information. However, if beliefs about group productivity are driven by bias rather than by an agnostic lack of information, agents may be resistant to updating in the face of accurate information that contradicts stereotypes. In an experiment, I find that employers’ response to information about the labor market productivity of Black and White workers is a function of their implicit biases. Employers with stronger implicit biases against Black workers update their beliefs more in response to signals that are consistent with their biases (i.e. that imply the racial gap in productivity is higher than it is) than they do in response to signals that are inconsistent (i.e. that imply the racial gap in productivity is smaller or even reversed). This result suggests that providing accurate information about the labor market productivity of historically stigmatized groups may not be sufficient on its own to correct inaccurate beliefs or end inaccurate statistical discrimination. The third chapter examines what employers’ background check adjudicators see on applicants’ criminal records and how this affects the hiring process. My co-authors & I find that criminal records of any kind - even related to crimes for which the applicant has not been found legally guilty – significantly affect their employment probability. We use a large administrative dataset containing 65 million job applicants’ criminal histories. Fourteen percent of applicants in our data have a legally reportable criminal record. We document that most charges accrue to individuals with no prior criminal history and that most applicants’ records consist only of misdemeanors (54%). We also show that many charges (45%) are non-convictions (crimes of which the candidates are not legally guilty). Firms respond strongly to all criminals, but especially to felony records and violent records, ending the hiring process by issuing an “adverse action notice” over 60% of the time for applicants with either of these record types present. Systemic differences in criminal justice contact by race and gender lead to relatively higher rates of hiring discontinuation for Black and male applicants. Finally, we show that rates of adverse action notices issued to candidates with criminal records have fallen in recent years, in line with “fair chance” hiring practices, but gaps remain.

Economists have long recognized the importance of agriculture and the US has undertaken many policies aimed at supporting the nation's agriculture industry. A grassroots effort to educate youth on agriculture began with the founding of 4-H, a youth development organization. In this paper, I investigate whether exposure to youth agricultural education impacts workforce outcomes using newly digitized, county-level data on enrollment in 4-H. Using linked census data, I find that living in an area with high exposure to 4-H makes children more likely to become farmers. I conduct additional analysis on the interaction of farming and 4-H, finding that 4-H exposure is twice as impactful on children of farmers.

In this paper, I investigate empirically whether multinational enterprises respond to tax incentives when a bilateral tax treaty is formed between a high-tax jurisdiction and a low-tax jurisdiction. The US-Ireland Tax Convention became effective in 1998, and I investigate if US multinational firms change subsidiary establishment behavior in Ireland to take advantage of low income taxes. I study the mechanisms that firms can use to lower their tax incidence, either through shifting profits with tax-motivated transfer pricing practices or through the alleviation from double taxation post-treaty. My results do not show robust changes in subsidiary behavior using a synthetic control construction within a differences-in-differences specification. My linear estimates of firms' subsidiary establishment behavior, patent creation behavior, and overall tax incidence are all significant; I calculate robust estimates of a decrease in subsidiaries post-treaty with this differences-in-differences approach. My estimates of patent creation are ambiguous in sign and magnitude, pointing to heterogeneous effects.

Climate change is one of the most pervasive issues for society in the modern world. To successfully mitigate the devastating consequences of this phenomenon without sacrificing economic growth, the positive income-emissions nexus must be broken. In this paper, I asses the United States' progress along this dimension by investigating the time-varying effect of GDP on emissions from 1850-2018. I distinguish between the cyclical and trend relationship between income and emissions and utilize a Bayesian Time-Varying-Parameter (TVP) model to determine the effect of GDP on emissions over time. I find weak evidence that the United States follows the often-proposed Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) in the trend and base components of the nexus: the effect of GDP on emissions has significantly weakened over time but remains positive. Additionally, I present evidence that income and emissions have relatively decoupled for all components of the nexus, casting doubt on “degrowth” arguments, wherein this is only possible if economic growth slows. I find that since the 2000s, the long-run relationship of GDP and emissions has further decoupled, while the short-run relationship has intensified. I provide evidence that the United States’ increasingly green energy mix is a driver of this heterogeneity.