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This dissertation considers questions in the econometrics of discrete games of complete information. Chapter 1 proposes an econometric framework that explicitly models the selection of equilibria as a discrete choice model. Such framework could achieve point identification. A simulation based approach is proposed to estimate the structural model. Chapter 2 discusses the relationship among the three types of partial identification approaches available in the literature. I show a modified version of bound estimation is equivalent to the sensitive analysis approach and the sharp identification approach in the sense that they draw inference on the same identified set. Chapter 3 studies identification and estimation of discrete games in large networks. Moment inequalities on choice probabilities of subnetworks are constructed to partially identify the model. Monte Carlo studies are conducted in Chapter 1 and 3 to evaluate the performance of approaches developed in this dissertation. Two applications are considered, Chapter 1 contains a study on the entry competition in the home improvement industry; Chapter 3 studies peer effects on smoking in friend networks.

<p> Accurate estimation of alcohol price elasticity is important for policy analysis &ndash; e.g.., determining optimal taxes and projecting revenues generated from proposed tax changes. Several approaches to specifying and estimating the price elasticity of demand for alcohol can be found in the literature. There are two keys to policy-relevant specification and estimation of alcohol price elasticity. First, the underlying demand model should take account of alcohol consumption decisions at the extensive margin &ndash; i.e., individuals&rsquo; decisions to drink or not &ndash; because the price of alcohol may impact the drinking initiation decision and one&rsquo;s decision to drink is likely to be structurally different from how much they drink if they decide to do so (the intensive margin). Secondly, the modeling of alcohol demand elasticity should yield both theoretical and empirical results that are causally interpretable. The elasticity estimates obtained from the existing two-part model takes into account the extensive margin, but are not causally interpretable. </p><p> The elasticity estimates obtained using aggregate-level models, however, are causally interpretable, but do not explicitly take into account the extensive margin. There currently exists no specification and estimation method for alcohol price elasticity that both accommodates the extensive margin and is causally interpretable. I explore additional sources of bias in the extant approaches to elasticity specification and estimation: 1) the use of logged (vs. nominal) alcohol prices; and 2) implementation of unnecessarily restrictive assumptions underlying the conventional two-part model. I propose a new approach to elasticity specification and estimation that covers the two key requirements for policy relevance and remedies all such biases. I find evidence of substantial divergence between the new and extant methods using both simulated and the real data. Such differences are profound when placed in the context of alcohol tax revenue generation.</p>

<p> In recent decades, China has started to exhibit some of the children&rsquo;s weight problems commonly seen in more developed countries. This study addresses Chinese children&rsquo;s weight changes from two perspectives, using China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) data from 1991-2011. The first essay focuses on the impact of socio-economics status (SES) on children&rsquo;s weight changes and how the SES-weight gradient differs with age, gender and urban status. I find that the child&rsquo;s weight is positively correlated to SES, but the impact of SES diminishes with age. The rise of childhood obesity, especially in urban areas and among high SES families, might be attributed to globalization beginning in the 2000s, which modifies the culture of calorie intake and energy expenditure. </p><p> The second essay examines the intergenerational transmission of weight from parents to children. I find that low SES families have a stronger intergenerational persistence of weight, which suggests their inability to alter children&rsquo;s weight through nurturing. I also find that parents&rsquo; weights are an important predictor of children&rsquo;s weight after controlling for demographics, SES and living environment. A Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis suggests that more than half of the difference in children&rsquo;s BMI ranking between urban and rural areas is attributable to the different urban-rural endowments.</p>

In my dissertation, I develop new methods to understand the distributional effect of participating in a program or experiencing a treatment. This goal is different from most research in economics which either (i) restricts the effect of participating in a treatment to be the same across all individuals or (ii) allows for heterogeneous treatment effects but estimates the average effect of participating in a treatment. I consider the case where a researcher has access to panel data and wants to exploit having access to panel data by allowing for time invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Chapters 1 and 3 introduce new methods for comparing the observed distribution of treated potential outcomes for the treated group to their counterfactual distribution of untreated potential outcomes. Chapter 2 considers a more general class of distributional treatment effect parameters that depend on the joint distribution of treated and untreated potential outcomes; these are parameters that would not be identified even if a researcher had access to experimental data. Methodologically, the main innovation of my dissertation is to replace the unknown dependence, or copula, between potential outcomes with observed dependence in the past or observed dependence for the untreated group. I provide details on estimation and consider applications on (i) the distributional effects of participating in a job training program and (ii) the distributional effects of job displacement of older workers during the Great Recession.

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<p> This dissertation consists of three essays on monetary and fiscal policy in Indonesia. The first essay, Monetary Transmission Channel of Two Competing Central Banks, uses the Vector Autoregressive (VAR) methodology to investigate the relative influence of Indonesian and Singapore money market rates in the determination of retail interest rates across the regions in the many islands of Indonesia. The results indicate that the interest rates in several provinces that are located near Singapore (such as Batam Island) are jointly determined by the interest rates in both Indonesia and Singapore. The interest rate in most of the other provinces are determined only by the interest rate set by Bank Indonesia.</p><p> Examining the islands where the Singapore interest rate affects their retail interest rates, we do not see much evidence of capital flow between them and Singapore (e.g. there are no branches of Singapore banks on these islands). We suspect that offshoring activities by Singapore's firms, reflected by the high proportion of exports to Singapore, is an important factor in facilitating the pass-through of the interest rate in Singapore to these Indonesian provinces. Could monetary policy spillovers occur not just through capital movements but also through trade and offshoring activities?</p><p> The second essay, Offshoring and Interest Rate Linkages, is a theoretical essay that follows logically from the first essay. This essay is also motivated by the exodus of less productive firms from Singapore to Batam after the Singapore government had increased the minimum wage. This outcome is noteworthy because it contradicts the basic result of Ghironi and Melitz (2005) that only the most productive firms in a country engage in foreign activities, including offshoring production.</p><p> I model the firm's decision to offshore its production by extending the theoretical framework in Melitz (2003) to incorporate (a) heterogeneous firms, and (b) profit-maximizing banks. I find that offshoring increases with the difference between the domestic and foreign cost of capital and labor and also with country-specific productivity.</p><p> This extended model also allows me to suggest an interest rate linkage between Singapore and Batam in the absence of any capital movement. This is because the financing decision of the offshoring firm in Singapore determines the amount of its borrowing from Batam banks and hence affects the retail interest rate in Batam.</p><p> The third essay, Investigating the Impact of Administrative and Fiscal Decentralization in Indonesia on the Provision of Health, Education and Basic Infrastructure Services, looks at the welfare consequences of the drastic administrative and fiscal decentralization in the 1999-2004 period. I found 21 annual welfare indicators that were available for most of the regions and cities for the 1990-2013 period. I use the Chow test to test for structural breaks in the regression equations that characterize the evolution of each welfare indicator in every region/city. The estimations permit four key conclusions. </p><p> First, if there was a structural break in the evolution of the welfare indicators, it occurred in 2004 and not in 1999. This is not surprising because 1999 was the beginning of the decentralization process. Second, overly simple specifications will not find strong welfare effects. For example, many of the welfare indicators like literacy rate are bounded both in their minimum and maximum values, and so a linear specification would not find strong results unlike a specification that includes quadratic terms.</p><p> Third, some of the welfare indicators (e.g. literacy rate) did not show much improvement because they were defined for a low-level of welfare that were already satisfied when the decentralization program was enacted. Fourth, the welfare indicators that showed the most significant improvements involved construction, e.g. schools and roads. Possibly, local legislators not only recognized the big need for physical infrastructure but also that these were highly visible projects.</p>

At least half of personal health spending in the U.S. is related to behavior, lifestyle or other avoidable causes. This dissertation contributes to a recent growing literature which aims to understand what affects health behaviors, and how changes in health behaviors can affect health status and economic outcomes. In the first chapter I study a reform that occurred in Tennessee in which the state disenrolled 170,000 individuals from the Medicaid program. I find evidence that this reform decreased risky health behaviors and deteriorate health outcomes among the low educated. The second chapter analysis a policy that prohibits individuals from suing food service business for any weight-related lawsuit. I find evidence that even though this policy did affect people's intentions to lose weight, these intentions didn't translate into changes of their weight status. Finally, in the third chapter I link how a specific health behavior (obesity) can affect an economic outcomes: wages. I find that white females have a wage penalty for being obese. These three chapters provide evidence that health behaviors are affected by policies from different levels of government, and that in turn these effects can have health and economic implications.

This dissertation studies intellectual property and product standards policies in the global economy. The first chapter evaluates the case for national treatment (NT) as specified in the clause of the World Trade Organization. It is found that implementing NT does not necessarily increase global innovation, and can even reduce it when trade frictions exist between countries. The second chapter compares the welfare effects of a product standards agreement based on two principles: NT and mutual recognition (MR). The main finding here is that an agreement based on NT is more likely to yield higher welfare than one based on MR when countries have rather different valuations of the consumption externality caused by the product subject to the standard. Finally, the third chapter examines trends in innovative activities as measured by the filings and grants of various types of intellectual property (IP) in several major Asian countries during the period 1997â2011. The most striking findings relate to China, where the quantity of innovation increased dramatically whereas the quality of innovation remains low relative to the worldâs most innovative countries.

In this dissertation, I present two distinct essays in economics of culture and institutions that can be read independently from one another. In Chapter 2, using the European Social Survey data, I investigate the impact of increased educational attainment, induced by compulsory schooling reforms, on religiosity and superstitious beliefs. I find consistently negative effects of education on religiosity, superstitious beliefs, social religious acts (attending religious services) and solitary religious acts (the frequency of praying). In Chapter 3, I examine the impact of culture of leisure and tax rates on labor force participation and hours worked of second-generation immigrants residing in 26 European countries. The results show that for women, both taxes and culture of leisure impact participation and hours worked. For men, taxes influence labor supply both at the intensive and the extensive margins, but culture of leisure has no impact.