This dissertations consists of three chapters. The first chapter is on the topic of environmental economics and studies the question of the effects of air pollution on students’ school absences, finding significant and positive effects for air pollution, and PM10 in particular, on school absences. The second chapter is on...
This thesis is organized into three essays, each with particular insights involving public policy and family formation:
In the first essay, I address the well-documented correlation between the prestige of the university and the labor market income of its graduates by investigating whether a possible medium for this effect is...
In the first part of the dissertation, I investigate the nature of retail coupons, a popular tool for non-price competition. The widely expressed view that coupons are primarily a tool to allow price discrimination has received mixed empirical supports. I depart from the static framework of the price discrimination theory...
Chapter 1: (Bounds on the Counterfactual Revenue Distributions in Auctions with Reserve Prices) In first-price auctions with interdependent bidder values, the distributions of private signals and values cannot be uniquely recovered from bids in Bayesian Nash equilibria. Non-identification invalidates structural analyses that rely on exact identification of the model primitives....
Several semiparametric estimators recently developed in the econometrics literature are based on the rank correlation between the dependent and explanatory variables. Examples include the maximum rank correlation estimator (MRC) of Han (1987), the monotone rank estimator (MR) of Cavanagh and Sherman (1998), the pairwise-difference rank estimators (PDR) of Abrevaya (2003),...
The expansion of public education at the beginning of the twentieth century had a profound effect on the American economy. This dissertation explores the impact of changing educational institutions on both individuals and communities with a study of Iowa during its introduction of modern grammar schools and high schools during...
I show that the speed of price adjustment to aggregate technology shocks is substantially larger than to monetary policy shocks. In the context of large Bayesian Vector Autoregression models, I establish that aggregate and disaggregate prices adjust very quickly to technology shocks, while they only respond sluggishly to monetary policy...
The goal of this dissertation is to improve our understanding of the driving forces behind short-term movements in important aggregate variables such as exports, imports, the trade balance, output, investment, and employment. The first chapter contrasts the cyclical behavior of the trade balance and trade flows in a group of...
This dissertation is composed of three chapters, each contributing to different aspects of the literature of partially identified econometric models.
In the first chapter, I introduce a bootstrap procedure to perform inference in the class of partially identified econometric models defined by finitely many moment equalities and inequalities. I provide...
Ethicity, race and gender play an important role in labor markets; labor market outcomes such as hiring and compensation are very different across different social groups. These differentials are partly the result of differences in productivity and preferences and partly the result of discrimination. Chapter two uses an audit study...