Browsing by Author "Becker, Charles Maxwell"
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Item Open Access A Theory of Urban-Rural Bias: A Dual Dilemma of Political Survival(2011) Pierskalla, Jan HenrykPro-urban bias in policy is a common phenomenon in many developing countries. Bates (1981) has famously argued the wish to industrialize paired with the political clout of urban residents results in distinctly anti-rural policies in many developing countries. At the same time, empirical reality is much more varied than the standard urban bias argument suggests. Many government have actively supported agricultural producers and rural citizens at early stages of development. Building on Bates' argument, this paper develops a theory that identifies conditions under which politicians will institute pro urban or pro rural policies, by considering the threat of a rural insurgency. Specifically, the direction of urban-rural bias is a function of the asymmetric political threat geographically distinct groups pose to the survival of the central government.
Item Open Access Entrepreneurial Attractiveness: Amazon, Google, and the Search for Innovative Hot Spots(2018-04-18) Kropf, AnnaRecent economic literature suggests that entrepreneurship in technological fields can spur economic growth, making it a popular topic for city development officials. Yet, this increasingly popular phenomenon is met by many economic questions. One of those questions is which characteristics of metropolitan areas are attractive to entrepreneurs. To answer the question of attractiveness on both the small business and corporate levels, I compare across two case studies: Amazon’s search for a second headquarters and Google’s tech hub network. Using principal component analysis, I statistically deduce seven components of attractiveness from an original 34 variables. These components are then weighted using three methods—a case study, a survey, and an empirical method—to produce comparable indices of attractiveness. Generally, I find that sizeable population and healthy economy are the strongest components. However, the statistically insignificant components that can change an urban area’s ranking considerably are talent and geographic network effects. Ultimately, creating policy to maximize these aspects can change a city’s innovative trajectory.Item Open Access Essays in Institutional Economics(2011) Lustig, Scott JordanThis dissertation is a collection of three chapters all pertaining to institutional economics. In short, the eld of institutional economics is an outgrowth of public economics, in the sense that in many cases he key institutions that frame economic decisionmaking are the product of public policy. However this is not exclusive. Institutional economics' key contribution is the acknowledgement that cultural and social institutions --- often developed organically over the course of centuries --- can play as signicant a role in individuals' economic choices as governmental policy. In the pages that follow, we will address the economic impact of cultural and political institutions in three contexts: Judicial decisionmaking in Islamic courts, the effects
of negative health shocks on retirement savings, and the tradeoff between retirement savings and investment in durable goods.
Item Open Access Female Labor Force Participation in Turkic Countries: A Study of Azerbaijan and Turkey(2019-04) Torrens, NatashaEncouraging female labor force participation (FLFP) should be a goal of any country attempting to increase its productive capacity. Understanding the determinants and motivations of labor force participation requires isolating the factors that influence a woman’s decision to enter or leave formal employment. In this thesis, I utilize data from the Demographics and Health Surveys to explain the role of social conservatism in promoting or limiting participation in the labor force. I focus on ever-married women in Azerbaijan and Turkey to provide a lens through which to explain the unexpectedly low FLFP of Turkey. Though most prior research attempts to explain Turkey’s low FLFP rate by comparisons to other OECD countries, my study looks at Turkey through the context of other Turkic cultures to explore cultural factors driving labor force participation for ever-married women. This study finds a negative correlation between conservatism and the likelihood of participating in the labor force for ever-married women in Azerbaijan, and a larger, positive relationship in Turkey.Item Open Access Health and Credit in Sub-Saharan Africa(2012) Johnson, Kristin MauraThis dissertation explores two important development policies, the introduction of microcredit, and access to free anti-retroviral medications, including the causal impact of providing access through a randomized control trial, and exploring expectations of policy outcomes through a new and innovative survey design. The first chapter conducts an impact evaluation of the introduction of microcredit in rural Ethiopia. Despite the prominence of micro-finance in development policy, only few rigorous impact evaluations have been conducted to date, a large majority in Asia. We describe the results of two parallel large-scale randomized controlled trials completed between 2003 and 2006 in rural Amhara and Oromiya (Ethiopia). We first document that borrowing increased substantially in communities where the programs started their operations. However, we find only mixed evidence of improvements in economic activities, including agriculture, animal husbandry and non-farm self-employment. We find instead that the introduction of micro-credit was overall associated with significant improvements in school attendance among 10-16 years old boys and (in Amhara only) among children of age 6-9 of either gender. Implications of the imperfect compliance with the experimental protocol are also discussed.
The second chapter explores the evidence that suggests that even in a setting where medications are free, HIV positive patients do not always follow doctors' recommendations to take anti-retroviral therapy (ART). In Tanzania, a country disproportionately affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, 20% of HIV-positive persons in our study sample do not fully adhere to their medication regimen. Individuals who take ART face a tradeoff between decreasing risk of death due to HIV and increasing risk of adverse side effects. The decision of whether or not to start and continue ART depends on the patient's subjective expectations about the realization of health outcomes under different levels of adherence.
This paper combines new and innovative data on probabilistic expectations and elicited discount rates with self-reported measures of adherence to analyze individual beliefs about the effectiveness of available medication, and more specifically, how these beliefs influence individuals' decisions to adhere to a medication regime. Medical literature suggests that in order for ART to be effective, 95% of doses must be taken on time, and we find that patients are aware of this threshold. They report a dramatic increase in the probability of mortality between fully adhering and taking less than 95% of doses.
Comparing elicited expectations with realized outcomes, we find that predictions of health outcomes were significantly different than realized outcomes in the following period. Respondents learned that perfectly adhering did not make them feel as good as they thought it would, and conversely, that imperfectly adhering did not make them feel as badly as they thought it would. In addition, respondents who were not on ART significantly overestimated being in worse health. As such, we would expect that individuals' expectations would adjust over time to match more closely with realized outcomes. Examining how expectations change over time, we find that individuals update their expectations consistent with a Bayesian updating framework in which current expectations are determined by prior beliefs and new information.
Significant predictors of expectations include, overall health, completion of primary school, past choices, and patience as it related to health. Patience is measured by questions in the new survey allowing the estimation of a person-specific discount factor. This elicited discount factor (higher indicates more patience) does not vary significantly by gender, but HIV-positive respondents are significantly less patient than HIV-negative respondents.
Finally, incorporating elicited expectations we find that perceived effectiveness is an important predictor of taking ART, specifically respondents are less likely to take ART if they believe that taking it will worsen their health or increase their chances of mortality. Perceptions of the medications' effectiveness at reducing viral loads are significant predictors of perfect adherence and there is also evidence that adherence decisions are consistent with respondents' desire to avoid feeling nauseous, but that feeling fatigued may be associated with the effectiveness of ART.
Overall, this paper provides an analysis of individual subjective expectations data in an HIV/AIDS context and provides evidence that while individual subjective expectations do not accurately predict future health outcomes, they significantly influence adherence decisions. It is not sufficient to only use observable characteristics of HIV patients when analyzing adherence, as their expectations of the future comprise a large component of their decision to fully adhere to their medication regimen.
Item Open Access Hedonic Modeling of Singapore's Resale Public Housing Market(2017-05-04) Xu, JiakunThe large-scale, high-density public housing market in Singapore invites hedonic analysis, due to its homogeneity in structure quality across all neighborhoods. This paper builds a time-dummy hedonic regression model incorporating geospatial features for a large dataset of resale transactions from 2000 to 2016. Significant anticipatory price effects are found for new subway stations, which peak at two years before station opening. A hedonic price index suggests that affordability was a problem during the sustained period of property price inflation from 2011 to 2013. District-level analysis shows evidence of increasing rent gradients, wealth disparities, and "lottery" effects in asset growth. I discuss the potential contributions of these insights to wealth and equity considerations in public policy design.Item Open Access Illuminating the Economic Costs of Conflict: A Night Light Analysis of the Sri Lankan Civil War(2023-07-29) Wijesekera, NicholasThis paper investigates the economic consequences of the Sri Lankan Civil War (1983-2009) by using event-based data on civilian and combatant fatalities in addition to night light imagery as a proxy for economic activity. By looking at regional economic activity across the island of Sri Lanka, this paper seeks to identify how violence led to declines or undershoots of economic activity in the areas in which it was most prevalent. The use of night light data gives a hyper-localized proxy measurement of this activity for each year of the war. The investigation finds that government and rebel deaths have strong, negative effects on economic activity, and that these effects spill over across time and space. Additionally, the manner in which civilian deaths occur is an important determinant of their subsequent economic impact. The paper offers new findings on the economic legacy of the Sri Lankan Civil War and extends existing work on the use of night light data to measure economic activity during conflict.Item Open Access Migration, Remittances and Growth(2010) Ukueva, NurgulIn the first chapter of my dissertation I analyze the effect of migration and remittances on a small, open, migrant-sending country in the context of an endogenous growth model with technology transfers. I demonstrate that, due to a dynamic feedback effect from economic conditions to migration and from migration to economic development in an economy exposed to migration, initial conditions can determine its long-run steady state, leading to the rise of vicious or virtuous circles of development. Countries with a low level of technological development may end up in a poverty trap, in which a low level of development results in low wage rates and consequently high migration rates. The high migration and loss of manpower in a general equilibrium setting generates less demand for the adoption of leading technologies, reducing incentives to invest into new technologies. This reduced incentive effect in turn leads to low output and low wages and even higher migration in future periods. Potentially, as in the case of depopulated countries and regions the economy diverges from the world's growth rate and eventually ends up being emptied out. In addition, I show, that altruistic remittances as an important by-product of migration allow people to share the benefits of technological advances developed elsewhere and dampen the negative impact of migration. In particular, remittances remove the limiting case of emptying out of the economy and reduce the chances of ending up in a poverty trap.
In the second chapter of my dissertation, I study the implications of migration and remittances for an economy with financial frictions. I introduce migration and remittances into Schumpeterian endogenous growth model with financial constraints and derive the conditions under which migration and remittances can have positive or negative impacts on the country's growth and convergence. I show that the results depend on the degree of the country's financial development and its distance to the technological frontier. Importantly, I show that if the financial constraint is strong, so that the economy is diverging from the world's growth path, then migration and remittances can have growth effects and can increase the steady state growth rate of the country as well as the likelihood that the country will converge to the world's growth path.
My third chapter uses a new household-level panel dataset from Kyrgyzstan to study the determinants and implications of remittances and inter-household transfers in general in Kyrgyzstan. We find that remittances in Kyrgyzstan are positively correlated with the income of the receiving households and that the remittance-receiving households have a higher probability of purchasing durable goods then households not receiving remittances.
Item Unknown The Impact of Medicare Nonpayment: a Quasi-Experimental Approach(2020-04-20) Kornkven, AudreyIn October 2008, a provision of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 known as Medicare “Nonpayment” went into effect, eliminating reimbursement for the marginal costs of preventable hospital-acquired conditions in an effort to correct perverse incentives in hospitals and improve patient safety. This paper contributes to the existing debate surrounding Nonpayment’s efficacy by considering varying degrees of fiscal pressure among hospitals; potential impacts on healthcare utilization; and differences between Medicare and non-Medicare patient populations. It combines data on millions of hospital discharges in New York from 2006-2010 with hospital-, hospital referral region-, and county-level data to isolate the policy’s impact. Analysis exploits the quasi-experimental nature of Nonpayment via difference-in-differences with Mahalanobis matching and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs. In line with results from Lee et al. (2012), Schuller et al. (2013), and Vaz et al. (2015), this paper does not find evidence that Nonpayment reduced the likelihood that Medicare patients would develop a hospital-acquired condition, and concludes that the policy is not likely the success claimed by policymakers. Results also suggest that providers may select against unprofitable Medicare patients when possible, and are likely to vary in their responses to financial incentives. Specifically, private non-profit hospitals appear to have been most responsive to the policy. These findings have important implications for pay-for-performance initiatives in American healthcare.Item Unknown The Impact of Violence in Mexico on Education and Labor Outcomes: Do Conditional Cash Transfers Have a Mitigating Effect?(2019-04-12) Barton, HayleyThis research explores the potential mitigating effect of Mexico’s conditional cash transfer program, Oportunidades, on the education and labor impacts of increased homicide rates. Panel data models are combined with a difference-in-differences approach to compare children and young adults who receive cash transfers with those who do not. Results are very sensitive to specification, but Oportunidades participation is shown to be positively associated with educational attainment regardless of homicide increases. Homicides are associated with decreases in likelihood of school enrollment and compulsory education completion; however, they also correspond with increases in educational attainment, with a larger effect for Oportunidades non-recipients.Item Open Access VizMaps: A Bayesian Topic Modeling Based PubMed Search Interface(2015) Kamboj, KirtiA common challenge that users of academic databases face is making sense of their query outputs for knowledge discovery. This is exacerbated by the size and growth of modern databases. PubMed, a central index of biomedical literature, contains over 25 million citations, and can output search results containing hundreds of thousands of citations. Under these conditions, efficient knowledge discovery requires a different data structure than a chronological list of articles. It requires a method of conveying what the important ideas are, where they are located, and how they are connected; a method of allowing users to see the underlying topical structure of their search. This paper presents VizMaps, a PubMed search interface that addresses some of these problems. Given search terms, our main backend pipeline extracts relevant words from the title and abstract, and clusters them into discovered topics using Bayesian topic models, in particular the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). It then outputs a visual, navigable map of the query results.