Browsing by Subject "Technology adoption"
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Item Open Access Air Pollution, Water, and Sanitation: Household Response to Environmental Risk(2020) Pakhtigian, Emily LDespite the threats to morbidity, mortality, and human capital accumulation posed by environmental risks, investments in environmental health technologies remain low. This is especially evident in low- and middle-income countries, which disproportionately shoulder the burden of environmental risk exposure and consequence. Households face competing risks associated with poor air and water quality, necessitating choices about how to invest in technologies to reduce the consequences associated with their exposures. Yet, even in areas where access to environmental health technologies such as improved cookstoves, latrines, and insecticide-treated bednets has expanded and products are subsidized to make them more affordable, adoption and use of these technologies often lag. This dissertation examines some of the conditions that impact environmental health technology adoption and use decisions as well as the health implications of low investment.
In Chapter 1, I ask how air pollution exposure drives consumption behaviors and impacts health outcomes. I examine this question in the short term--asking how behavior and health respond to a large, yet transitory, spike in ambient air pollution--as well as over time--considering the responses to average ambient air pollution levels over a period of 19 years. I leverage variation in air pollution resulting from forest fire emissions in Indonesia between 1996 and 2015 to generate short-term exposure spikes and average exposures over time, and I combine these exposures with four waves household and individual-level survey data. I implement a cross-sectional, difference-in-difference analysis to estimate the immediate effects of an unexpectedly severe forest fire season in 2015, finding increased fuel demands among the most-exposed households as well as declines in lung capacity among emissions-affected children. I extend my analysis across the panel using an instrumental variables approach to estimate consequences of average exposure over time. I find that households facing higher average ambient air pollution exposures are more likely to utilize clean cooking fuels such as LPG. Even with these behavioral adjustments, more-exposed individuals face significant reductions in lung capacity. In line with existing literature, I find negative health implications resulting from short-term exposure shocks; however, my analysis demonstrates that these respiratory consequences are not fleeting, particularly in areas that experience elevated average ambient air pollution levels.
In Chapter 2, I turn to environmental risks posed by limited access to improved sanitation technologies to examine how social influences impact household sanitation decisions. Using three waves of data collected immediately before, a few months after, and a few years after a randomized latrine promotion campaign in rural Orissa, India, I evaluate the extent to which social influences impact sanitation choices. I find that a ten percentage point decrease in neighbors' open defecation reduces a household's likelihood of open defecation by 3-4 percentage points. The sanitation intervention decreased open defecation in the short term; however, this treatment was less effective in neighborhoods with higher rates of open defecation due to strong social effects. Disaggregating social effects by gender, I find that both women and men respond to sanitation behaviors among male neighbors in the short term and female neighbors in the longer term, perhaps because men have more control over initial latrine purchasing decisions while women are more influential in sustaining latrine use over time.
Finally, in Chapter 3, I expand on my analysis of social influences and sanitation practices and examine how households make decisions to contribute to collective action for sanitation. In this chapter, I analyze data from an experimental public goods game I designed and implemented among over 1500 households in rural Bihar and Orissa, India. I randomly assigned each of the 70 villages in the sample into groups that are either homogeneous or heterogeneous by gender for game play. In the context of rural India, individuals are more likely to frequently interact with and make decisions in front of others of the same gender. Thus, splitting the groups in this way provides a proxy for peer or social groups. Participants chose how much to contribute to improved sanitation by making decisions in the game that are associated with actual sanitation and hygiene choices they face every day. Payoffs were awarded after each round, and payoff amounts were dependent on both individual contributions and aggregated group contributions, generating a setting in which the benefits participants received were connected. Comparing the game behavior among participants in groups that were homogeneous and heterogeneous by gender, I find evidence that contributions to collective action for sanitation are higher in gender homogenous groups. Female participants drive this difference, and it is more distinct in the first round of game play. I also find evidence that preferences for improved sanitation as elicited during the experimental games are reflective of actual improved sanitation practices at the household level.
Item Open Access Essays on Strategic Investment(2017) Skiti, TediMy dissertation explores the implications of strategic investment on market structure,
new firm entry and technology diffusion. In particular, I build on existing
theoretical models and empirical methods and develop new ones to identify strategic
investment and empirically measure its implications. This dissertation aims to
provide a framework of how firms strategically invest to deter entry and what is the
optimal entry policy in these markets. Although there is a significant theoretical
literature on strategic investment, there is only limited empirical work.
In the first chapter of my dissertation, I present a simple theoretical model of
technology adoption to illustrate why firms may have incentive to excessively invest
in the case of entry threat.
In the second chapter of my dissertation, I present a model of strategic entry
deterrence and study how internet service providers’ interactions affect their technology
deployment at local markets. The goal is to capture an important trade-off:
cable firms adopt a new cable system to provide higher speeds, but the adoption
has a preemptive effect on fiber firms’ entry. I collect and combine unique firm-level
data on broadband technology deployment and exogenous city-firm level franchise
agreements data for potential fiber entrants for New York State. I provide evidence
of strategic investment by cable incumbents to deter fiber entry. Counterfactual scenarios
suggest that the industry has experienced 16% excessive investment in cable
adoption and 12% underinvestment in fiber entry both of which are explained by
these deterrence strategies. In addition, subsidies to cable incumbents in small markets
reduce fiber entry rate by 50%. I also find that policies that promote statewide
entry as opposed to existing subsidy programs mitigate the effects from these deterrence
strategies and increase fiber entry rate by 30%. These results have wide
implications for technology diffusion, quality provision and optimal subsidy policy
in markets under entry threat.
In the third chapter of my dissertation, I investigate the effect of entry barriers
for municipal providers on incumbents’ strategic investment in the US broadband
industry. I use a spatial regression discontinuity design by examining incumbents
strategic behavior across the exogenous entry barriers. I collect and combine unique
firm-level data on incumbents’ investment decisions and state-level data about legal
entry barriers. I find that technology diffusion is slower and internet service quality
is lower in markets with entry barriers. In particular, I find that entry threat leads
to an increased cable investment of 10%. This article contributes to the limited
empirical literature that uses quasi-experimental methods to identify firms’ strategic
behavior and the role of entry barriers in equilibrium product quality. In addition,
it contibutes to the literature that examines the effect of competition, entry barriers
and entry threat on technology adoption as well as the role of public investment.
Item Open Access The Price of Purity: Willingness to pay for air and water purification technologies in Rajasthan, India(Environmental and Resource Economics) Shannon, Alexandra; Usmani, F; Pattanayak, SK; Jeuland, MADiarrheal illnesses and acute respiratory infections are among the top causes for premature death and disability across the developing world, and adoption of various technologies for avoiding these illnesses remains extremely low. We exploit data from a unique contingent valuation experiment to consider whether households in rural Rajasthan are unwilling to make investments in "domain-specific" environmental health technologies when faced with health risks in multiple domains. Results indicate that demand for water-related risk reductions is higher on average than demand for air-related risk reduction. In addition, households' private health benefits from mitigating diarrheal (respiratory) disease risks are higher (no different) when community-level air pollution risks, rather than community-level water pollution risks, have previously been mitigated. This asymmetric response cannot fully be explained by survey order effects or embedding, but rather suggests that that the broader health environment and the salience of particular risks may be important in households' decision to adopt environmental health technologies.Item Open Access The Virtual Hand: How Digitization Changes Organizations, Management, and Entry(2022) Hall, Todd AThis dissertation explores the consequences of digitization for organizations, management, and firm entry using three empirical studies.
In chapter 2, I demonstrate that the appropriate organizational response to IT adoption depends on manager job requirements, but that aligning technology and manager organization could create conflict with firm strategy. To do this, I use a unique data set of hospital employment records, an IT survey, and occupational information. I find that divisions with high manager communication requirements employ fewer managers that supervise more subordinates as they adopt IT. On the other hand, divisions with low manager communication requirements employ more managers that supervise fewer subordinates as they adopt IT. These results demonstrate previously overlooked nuance to the manager organization-IT relationship—some IT-adopting organizations require more managers to manage the same number of workers. I also find that decreasing supervision is associated with lower quality and costs. Because of this, increases in span of control among high communication managers is attenuated at hospitals that are more likely to compete against other hospitals to attract patients based on quality of care.
In chapter 3, I detail changes in the jobs of managers during the 2010-2020 time period. I then ask which firms are at the forefront of adopting an emerging practice, Agile Marketing, and which benefit from adoption. I find a positive relationship between Agile Marketing adoption and firm revenue for both early and late adopters. This relationship is mostly driven by returns several years after adoption. The results highlight the importance of learning when assessing the potential returns to adopting emerging management practices.
Chapter 4 demonstrates that software availability is associated with an increase in entry and an increase in exit by the oldest and most established firms. We suggest three potential mechanisms and, through post hoc analysis, determine which is most consistent with observed patterns. We find the effect of software availability on entry is stronger in settings with more available IT talent, more permissive labor policies, and greater demand uncertainty. Observed patterns are most consistent with software enhancing labor productivity and thus reducing exposure to uncertainty.