Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1990. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Andrea Ichino. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1991. / Title as it appears in the M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1991: Three essays in political economy. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 117-123). / by Roberto Perotti. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1987. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographies. / by Diderik Lund. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 91-92). / by Jonah Benjamin Gelbach. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 168-174). / This dissertation consists of three empirical studies, each using administrative data from the U.S. Army, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and the U.S. Social Security Administration. The first chapter investigates the correlation between local labor markets and VA Disability Compensation (DC) receipt among National Guard veterans who deployed to a combat zone between 2003 and 2006. I find that veterans from hometowns with low employment-to-population ratios are more likely to receive DC for both PTSD and physical conditions than veterans from hometowns with high employment-to-population ratios, but this association is stronger for PTSD than it is for physical conditions. PTSD awards that result in monthly benefit payments of at least $1,500 account for most of the correlation between employment-to-population ratios and PTSD, while only physical awards that generate relatively low payments are associated with employment-to-population ratios. The second chapter, a joint project with David Autor, Mark Duggan, and David Lyle, analyzes the effect of the DC program on Vietnam veterans' labor force participation and earnings. Exploiting the 2001 Agent Orange decision, which expanded DC eligibility for Vietnam-era veterans who served in-theater but not for other Vietnam-era veterans, we assess the causal effects of DC eligibility by contrasting the outcomes of these two Vietnam-era veteran groups. We estimate that benefits receipt reduced labor force participation by 18 percentage points among veterans enrolled due to the policy, though measured income net of transfer benefits rose on average. The third chapter exploits enlistment test score cutoffs in a fuzzy regression-discontinuity (RD) design to evaluate the causal effect of military service on mortality for individuals who applied to the active duty U.S. Army from 1996 through 2007. Fuzzy RD estimates suggest that military service does not increase mortality, but I cannot rule out positive effects. Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) estimates that compare applicants who did not enlist to soldiers with similar characteristics provide additional evidence that military service does not increase mortality. OLS estimates also indicate that a soldier's first year in the Army is associated with substantial reductions in mortality relative to nonveteran applicants. / by Kyle Greenberg. / Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-289). / This thesis consists of three chapters on the economics of labor markets. Each chapter explores an aspect of the distributional consequences of labor market shocks due to changes in trade, regulations, or technology. The first chapter investigates the extent to which geographic variation in wage growth reflects workers' incomplete arbitrage of changing job opportunities in different locations, industries, and occupations. Without moving costs, worker adjustment to changes in labor demand would eliminate differential earnings effects between directly exposed workers and others in the same skill group. I find evidence against this full-mobility benchmark, estimating that exposure to trade with China reduces earnings of non-college educated workers in exposed Commuting Zones (CZs) by 4%, and fracking increases earnings of the original residents of exposed CZs by 7%. I estimate a model of location, sector, and occupation choice to quantify the costs that rationalize this incomplete arbitrage. Simulations show that halving these moving costs would have reduced the effect of exposure to trade with China by 35%. In the second chapter, Scott Nelson and I study recent bans on employers' use of credit reports to screen job applicants. Exploiting geographic, temporal, and job-level variation in which workers are covered by these bans, we find that the bans reduced job-finding rates for blacks by 7 to 16 log points, and increased separation rates for black new hires by 3 percentage points. We interpret these findings in a statistical discrimination model in which credit report data provides employers with a higher precision signal of workers' skills, compared to employers' prior beliefs and knowledge about workers' skills; this signal has particularly strong effects on blacks' employment outcomes. In the third chapter, Janet Currie, Christopher Knittel, Michael Greenstone, and I investigate the local welfare consequences of hydraulic fracturing. Exploiting geological and temporal variation, we find that allowing fracking leads to improvements in a wide set of economic indicators. At the same time, estimated willingness-to-pay (WTP) for the decrease in local amenities is equal to $1000 to $1,600 per household annually. Overall, we estimate that the WTP for allowing fracking equals $1,300 to $1,900 per household annually. / by Alexander Wickman Bartik. / 1. Worker Adjustment to Changes in Labor Demand: Evidence from Longitudinal Census Data -- 2. Credit Reports as Résumés: The Incidence of Pre-Employment Credit Screening -- 3. The Local Economic and Welfare Consequences of Hydraulic Fracturing. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis contains three empirical essays using a new panel dataset of airplay on contemporary music radio stations. The first and third essays examine the timing of commercial breaks. Stations tend to play their commercials at the same time but it is unclear whether this is due to stations wanting to coordinate on timing, to reduce the avoidance of commercials, rather than common factors which simply make some times better for commercials. The first essay models timing decisions as an imperfect information coordination game. The game has multiple equilibria, in which stations coordinate but on different times, if the incentive to coordinate is strong enough. The essay shows how the existence of multiple equilibria, both in the game and in the data, can help to identify the parameters of the game and how to test for multiple equilibria. There is evidence of multiple equilibria, allowing the incentive to coordinate to be identified, during drivetime hours. The implied degree of coordination in Nash equilibrium is relatively modest but, because of externalities in the coordination game, the estimates also imply that coordination would be almost perfect if stations maximized their joint payoffs. The third essay uses a set of simple models to show that, if stations want to choose either the same or different times for commercials, the degree to which commercials overlap should depend on market characteristics such as the number of stations and the degree of common station ownership. The majority of the evidence supports models in which, on average, stations want to choose the same time for commercials as other stations in their market. / (cont.) The second essay examines how changes in radio station ownership have affected music variety and finds that a common owner of stations in the same local radio market and the same music category significantly increases the degree of differentiation between these stations, consistent with a model in which common owners internalize "business stealing" effects. Common ownership of stations in the same music category but different local markets results in, at most, a small degree of playlist homogenization. Panel data on station listenership provides further support for the business stealing explanation, as when stations in a local market become commonly owned their audiences tend to increase. / by Andrew Thomas Sweeting. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Andrés Almazán. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2013. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-94). / This thesis studies the role of the financial system in the amplification and propagation of business cycles. Chapter 1 studies the origin and propagation of balance sheet recessions. I first show that in standard models driven by TFP shocks, the balance sheet channel disappears when agents are allowed to write contracts on the aggregate state of the economy. In contrast, I show how uncertainty shocks can drive balance sheet recessions with depressed asset prices and growth, and trigger a "flight to quality" event with low interest rates and high risk-premia. Uncertainty shocks create an endogenous hedging motive that induces financial intermediaries to take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, even when contracts can be written on the aggregate state of the economy. Finally, I explore some implications for financial regulation. Chapter 2 studies a tractable model of dynamic moral hazard with purely pecuniary private benefits. The agent can trade a productive asset and secretly divert funds to a private account and use them to "recontract": at any time he can offer a new continuation contract to the principal, who accepts if the new contract is attractive. The main result is that the optimal contract can be characterized as the solution to a standard portfolio problem with a simple "skin in the game" constraint. The setting places few restrictions on preferences and the distribution of shocks, distinguishes between (observable) aggregate shocks and (unobservable) idiosyncratic shocks, and takes arbitrary general equilibrium prices as given. This makes the results easily applicable to many macro and financial applications. Chapter 3 explores under what conditions the presence of moral hazard can create a balance sheet amplification channel. If the private action of the agent exposes him to aggregate risk through his unobserved private benefit, the optimal contract will try to over-expose him to aggregate risk to deter him from misbehaving. This creates a tradeoff between aggregate and idiosyncratic risk-sharing. More productive agents naturally want to leverage more and therefore have larger incentives to distort their aggregate risk-sharing in order to reduce their exposure to idiosyncratic risk. In equilibrium, therefore, more productive agents take on a disproportionate fraction of aggregate risk, creating a balance sheet channel. / by Sebastian T. Di Tella. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 126). / by Darren Paul Timothy. / Ph.D.