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Thèse. HEC. 2014
The second essay, "Imputations: Benefits, Risks and a Method for Missing Data", examines methods to deal with missing variables and missing observations. While the conditions under which missing data does not lead to bias as well as the conditions for missing data methods to yield consistent estimates are well understood, they often do not hold in practice. In order to provide guidance on whether to omit the missing data or to apply a method for missing data, the paper first examines conditions under which these methods can improve estimates and then discusses biases from frequent violations of their assumptions. I then discuss advantages and problems of common missing data methods. Two important problems are that most methods work well for some models, but poorly for others and that researchers often do not have enough information to use imputed observations in common data sets appropriately. To address these problems, I develop a method based on the conditional density and apply it to common problems to show that it works well in practice.
This collection of Michael Grossman’s most important papers adds essential background and depth to his work on economic determinants of public health. Each of the book’s four sections includes an introduction that contextualizes the issues and addresses the larger stakes of his work. An afterword discusses the significance of Grossman’s approach for subsequent research on health economics, as well as the work others have done to advance and extend his innovative perspective. Determinants of Health explains how the economic choices people make influence health and health behaviors. It begins with a section on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical results of Grossman’s groundbreaking health economics model, first introduced in the 1970s, followed by essays on the relationship between health and schooling; determinants of infant health, with a special emphasis on public policies and programs; and the economics of unhealthy behaviors. Grossman treats health as a form of human capital. He shows that public policies and programs that determine the price and availability of key inputs have critical effects on outcomes ranging from birth weight and infant mortality to cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, illegal drug use, and obesity. Grossman’s approach has led to a major stream of literature in the field, sparking contributions by the world’s leading health economists, including Joseph Newhouse, Jonathan Gruber, Amy Finkelstein, Michael Greenstone, and David Cutler. His clarity on the role that economics play in people’s good and bad health choices is immensely valuable to the debate over how we legislate and spend on health.
This dissertation consists of three chapters studying global trends in the world of labour markets and social relations. Two of the chapters use the refugee immigration wave in Germany, 2014-2016, as a natural experiment. The first paper takes a local perspective, investigating the areas around refugee shelters in Berlin. These areas have experienced a decline in perceived neighbourhood quality, as represented by real estate prices and by ratings on an online review site. At the same time, there was increased support for right-wing parties. In the second, I show the effect of aggregate refugee immigration on labour market regions in Germany. Employment and GDP have benefited from the immigration wave, due to the additional demand generated by refugees. The third paper is a cautionary look at the digitalization of labour relations - my coauthor Milena Petrova and I use data from an online labour market to show how the reputation mechanism can fail to incentivize seller effort when the returns to reputation fluctuate. The dissertation is mainly empirical in nature. I use a variety of different data sources - administrative and aggregated data, as well as rich datasets from online platforms. Common to all three chapters is the attempt to find novel natural experiments in observational data. In the chapter on local labour markets, I exploit local policy differences and infrastructure constraints to construct new instrumental variables, creating exogenous variation in local immigration. The other chapter on immigration is equally careful to establish the exogeneity of refugee shelter locations. And in the third chapter, we show that it is seasonal variation in the value of reputation, rather than for example seller characteristics and selection, that systematically induce undesirable outcomes.
This dissertation consists of three studies analyzing causes and consequences of location decisions by economic agents in the U.S. In Chapter 1, I address the longstanding question of the extent to which the geographic clustering of economic activity may be attributable to agglomeration spillovers as opposed to natural advantages. I present evidence on this question using data on the long-run effects of large scale hydroelectric dams built in the U.S. over the 20th century, obtained through a unique comparison between counties with or without dams but with similar hydropower potential. Until mid-century, the availability of cheap local power from hydroelectric dams conveyed an important advantage that attracted industry and population. By the 1950s, however, these advantages were attenuated by improvements in the efficiency of thermal power generation and the advent of high tension transmission lines. Using a novel combination of synthetic control methods and event-study techniques, I show that, on average, dams built before 1950 had substantial short run effects on local population and employment growth, whereas those built after 1950 had no such effects. Moreover, the impact of pre-1950 dams persisted and continued to grow after the advantages of cheap local hydroelectricity were attenuated, suggesting the presence of important agglomeration spillovers. Over a 50 year horizon, I estimate that at least one half of the long run effect of pre-1950 dams is due to spillovers. The estimated short and long run effects are highly robust to alternative procedures for selecting synthetic controls, to controls for confounding factors such as proximity to transportation networks, and to alternative sample restrictions, such as dropping dams built by the Tennessee Valley Authority or removing control counties with environmental regulations. I also find small local agglomeration effects from smaller dam projects, and small spillovers to nearby locations from large dams. Lastly, I find relatively small costs of environmental regulations associated with hydroelectric licensing rules. In Chapter 2, I study the joint choice of spouse and location made by individuals at the start of their adult lives. I assume that potential spouses meet in a marriage market and decide who to marry and where they will live, taking account of varying economic opportunities in different locations and inherent preferences for living near the families of both spouses. I develop a theoretical framework that incorporates a collective model of household allocation, conditional on the choice of spouse and location, with a forward-looking model of the marriage market that allows for the potential inability of spouses to commit to a particular intra-household sharing rule. I address the issue of unobserved heterogeneity in the tastes of husbands and wives using a control-function approach that assumes there is a one-to-one mapping between unobserved preferences of the two spouses and their labor supply choices. Estimation results for young dual-career households in the 2000 Census lead to three main findings. First, I find excess sensitivity of the sharing rule that governs the allocation of resources among couples to the conditions in the location they actually choose, implying that spouses cannot fully commit to a sharing rule. Second, I show that the lack of commitment has a relatively larger effect on the share of family resources received by women. Third, I find that the failure of full commitment can explain nearly all of the gap in the interstate migration rates of single and married people in the U.S. Finally, in Chapter 3, I examine unintended consequences of environmental regulations affecting the location of power plants. I present evidence that while hydroelectric licensing rules do conserve the wilderness and the wildlife by restricting the development of hydro projects in some counties, they lead to more greenhouse gas emissions in those same locations. Such environmental regulations aimed to preserve natural ecosystems do not seem to really protect nature. Basically, land conservation regulations give rise to a replacement of hydropower, which is a renewable, non-emitting source of energy, with conventional fossil-fuel power, which is highly pollutant. Restrictions imposed by hydroelectric licensing rules might be used as leverage by electric utilities to get permits to expand thermal power generation. Each megawatt of hydropower potential that is not developed because of those regulations induces the production of the average emissions of carbon dioxide per megawatt of U.S. coal-fired power plants. Environmental regulations focusing only on the preservation of ecosystems appears to stimulate dirty substitutions within electric utilities regarding electricity generation.