Browsing by Author "McElroy, Marjorie B"
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Item Open Access ADDITIVE GENERAL ERROR MODELS FOR PRODUCTION, COST, AND DERIVED DEMAND OR SHARE SYSTEMS(JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY, 1987-08) McElroy, Marjorie BItem Open Access Essays in Labor Economics: Effects of Immigration Policy on Vulnerable Populations(2020) Grittner, Amanda MelinaThis dissertation studies three questions in labor economics centering around immigration policy and its effects on vulnerable populations. I use administrative data from the United States (U.S.) and Germany to address these questions empirically.
In the first chapter, I investigate the effects of an increase in immigration enforcement through local police force on domestic violence victims’ help-seeking behavior. I use a fixed effects model, a generalized synthetic control method and novel administrative data on the use of services for domestic violence victims in North Carolina. In North Carolina, a large fraction of individuals of Hispanic origin are undocumented immigrants or connected to undocumented immigrants. I find that local immigration enforcement significantly reduces Hispanics’ use of domestic violence services. It does not affect service use by African Americans who are predominantly U.S.-born citizens. This suggests that the decrease in Hispanics' service use is directly related to their immigration status and not driven by a general effect on minorities. I do not find any robust evidence that local immigration enforcement affects intimate partner homicides of Hispanic women.
The second chapter studies the relationship between workforce demographics, workplace hazard, and worker complaints about hazardous or illegal working conditions. In joint work with Matthew Johnson, I examine if worker complaints are effective in directing inspections by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration to the most hazardous workplaces. We measure worker complaints and workplace injuries by inspections triggered by a worker complaint and a serious workplace injury, respectively. We find that the complaint rate in a county and industry is positively associated with its recent injury rate. This relationship changes for workplaces with a high share of Hispanic workers. Workplaces that employ larger shares of Hispanic workers have lower complaint rates, but higher injury rates. We use fixed effects regressions to estimate the effect of local immigration enforcement on Hispanic workers' willingness to complain about hazardous conditions. We find that stronger enforcement significantly reduces worker complaints, but not workplace injuries in workplaces with a high share of Hispanic workers. This provides evidence that stronger local immigration enforcement reduces Hispanic workers' willingness to complain about unsafe working conditions irrespective of the true workplace hazard.
In the third chapter, I investigate the effect of integrating refugee students in elementary schools on the academic performance of native students. Using administrative data from Germany, I exploit the variation in the percentage of refugee students within schools to account for endogenous sorting of refugees into schools. I do not find any evidence for negative effects of refugee students' integration on the academic performance of native elementary students. In contrast, exposure to refugee students reduces mandatory grade retention rates of German fourth graders. Effects on the percentage of students who receive a recommendation for the higher secondary track are very small and statistically insignificant. I also show that refugee students attend schools where German students' performance is lower.
Item Open Access Essays in Law and Economics(2009) Iyavarakul, TongyaiThis dissertation comprises of three essays in law and economics. The first chapter, a joint work with my advisor - Marjorie McElroy, examines the longly debated effect of the liberalized divorce laws in the United States on the divorce rates during 1956-1989. The first and the second chapter are a theoretical and an empirical paper on a cooperative game of bribery.
Item Open Access Marriage Formation and Dissolution in the United States(2013) Staub, Kalina MarieThis dissertation consists of two essays that examine marital formation and dissolution in the United States. The first chapter highlights the roles that both the availability of men and competition from women within a marriage market play in the low marriage rates of uneducated black women. Black women who drop out of high school are far less likely to marry than those who do not; however, they also, counterintuitively, face much more favorable marriage markets than more educated women if we define marriage markets as independent by education level, as is standard. Using a simple model of the marriage market with men and women of different quality levels that allows for marriage market integration across education levels, I show that the marriage prospects of any woman should depend not only on the availability of men, but also the competition from more educated women. Additionally, this model predicts that any gender imbalance should disproportionately affect the marriage prospects for the least educated. Using data from the 1979-2004 waves of the NLSY79, I estimate discrete-time hazard models of first marriages for black women, capturing a woman's marriage prospects in four ways: (i) using a flexible specification that includes five ratios for the relative availability of men as well as the prevalence of competing women at each education level, (ii) using the ratios for the availability of men and women at adjacent education levels, (iii) using an education-specific simple sex ratio from the educationally segmented marriage markets that dominate the literature, and (iv) using a "cascading'' sex ratio implied by the simple model. The results emphasize the importance not only of the supply of men, but also of the competition from other women for the least educated women. Thus, marriage market measures that do not account for this cross-education competition greatly overstate the favorability of the marriage markets for uneducated black women.
The second chapter is joint work with my advisor Marjorie McElroy and Tongyai Iyavarakul which presents a new approach to the reduced-form estimation of dynamic models using aggregated panel data. With forward looking behaviors, exogenous changes in laws or rules give rise to selection effects on those considering entry and surprise effects for those who have already entered. We develop a model, the Cohort Panel Data Model (CPDM), to examine the effects of divorce law changes on divorce rates. Our analysis has several key features. First, we introduce the concept of a marriage cohort, a group of people married under a certain set of laws. The calculation of the shares of the population in each marriage cohort is a key element of our aggregation protocol. Second, the model includes floodgate effects, a spike in the divorce rate followed by a decline, resulting from heterogeneity within these marriage cohorts. Lastly, we develop a wait-time index for the cost of divorce and carefully code divorce laws based on two dimensions: costs and rights. Thus the model allows for an unbiased test of the Coase Theorem since our model gives the surprise effect of a change in the rights to divorce holding costs constant. Results strongly support the idea that unanticipated divorce law changes affected divorce rates, but finds that these effects are operating through changing costs and not changes in rights (supporting the Coase Theorem). Additionally, lower divorce costs are found to increase divorce rates through the selection of less well-matched couples into marriage. Finally we reconcile our results with previous studies by showing that previous studies that do not differentiate between costs and rights suffer from omitted variables bias and improper aggregation over marriage cohorts.
Item Open Access THE JOINT DETERMINATION OF HOUSEHOLD MEMBERSHIP AND MARKET WORK - THE CASE OF YOUNG MEN(JOURNAL OF LABOR ECONOMICS, 1985) McElroy, Marjorie B