Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis, I estimate a structural demand model for prescription drug benefits by Medicare beneficiaries using data from the Medicare HMO program. I then use the utility parameter estimates to explore other questions of interest relating to the elderly's demand for prescription drug benefits. In Chapter 1, I study the question of how much Medicare beneficiaries value prescription drug benefits. Using data from the Medicare HMO program, I find that Medicare beneficiaries are willing to pay $33 to increase their brand-name coverage limit by $100. I also estimate marginal cost for each HMO and regress it on prescription drug benefits. I find that raising brand-name coverage by $100 costs $30. These estimates suggest that Medicare HMO enrollees are less than average prescription drug users and the results give a lower bound for the welfare derived by the elderly from prescription drug benefits. Chapter 2 addresses the question of how Medicare HMOs' choices of premiums and benefits affect selection. Changes in demographic factors (a measure of risk based on beneficiaries' characteristics) and risk scores (a measure based on beneficiaries' inpatient diagnoses) in the fee-for-service sector are regressed on changes in premiums and benefits in the HMO sector. The results show that increasing premiums and lowering benefits raise the demographic factor but have no effect on the risk score, suggesting that beneficiaries in more expensive demographic categories switch out of HMOs when premiums rise and benefits fall but these beneficiaries are healthy for their demographic category. / (cont.) Chapter 3 measures the welfare loss from the withdrawals from the HMO program following the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, using the utility parameter estimates from Chapter 1. The changes to the Medicare HMO program in the Balanced Budget Act triggered many plan withdrawals from the program. The welfare and costs are calculated under two counterfactual scenarios. The results show that the Medicare HMO program generates more welfare than costs and that the withdrawals resulted in a net loss for society. The estimates of the loss range from $4.3 billion to $16.6 billion. / by Anne Elizabeth Hall. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three essays. The first one studies the effect of labor policy, in particular of firing costs, on financially restricted firms. It proposes and models an effect of firing costs that has not been described in the literature so far. When a time gap exists between production and its associated revenues, firing can become a liquidity adjustment tool that allows firms to increase their short-term liquidity. The presence of firing costs reduces the ability of firms to use this tool. This reduction negatively affects the optimal levels of investment and production of financially restricted firms. I present empirical evidence in line with this effect. The second essay studies the empirical relationship between aggregate macroeconomic volatility and idiosyncratic firm-level volatility. This relationship is a testable implication of a rich set of theoretical models available in the literature. I propose a consistent estimator of the variance of firms' real sales growth rate (proxy for idiosyncratic volatility) based on the cross-sectional properties of firms' distribution. I use optimal structural break tests and long-run relationship tests to study the relationship between aggregate and idiosyncratic firm-level volatility. The main empirical results suggest a negative and significant long-run relationship. / (cont.) The third essay, coauthored with Norman Loayza, analyzes potential monetary and fiscal policy biases that could result from the interaction between fiscal and monetary authorities-in a macro-policy environment where the monetary authority is committed to independently controlling inflation. We show that an increase in the divergence of authorities' preferences, with respect to the short-run trade-off between output and inflation gap, could lead to higher fiscal deficits and higher interest rates. We use a game-theoretic model to analyze this interaction, and we present supporting empirical evidence based on a panel data estimation for industrial countries. / by Herman Z. Bennett. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-208). / The first chapter explores the disciplining effect of elections on national leaders in Sub-Saharan Africa. I first show that the completion of development projects funded by the World Bank and implemented by governments between 1995 and 2014 yields large electoral benefits for incumbent politicians. The causal effect of completion is identified from an instrumental variables strategy that exploits exogenous variation in the workload of project team leaders at the World Bank. Incumbents are rewarded for completing projects in visible sectors, namely projects providing basic infrastructure and social services, but not for completing projects in other sectors. I then show that governments expedite completion in response to electoral incentives, target their effort towards visible projects, and prioritize completing ongoing projects over initiating new projects before elections. Even in Africa's hybrid political regimes, elections incentivize politicians to deliver tangible policy outputs. In the second chapter, Tavneet Suri, Thomas Stoker and I provide evidence of ethnic patronage in the determination of rental prices and investments in one of Africa's largest informal settlements, the Kibera slum in Nairobi. Slum residents pay higher rents and live in lower quality housing (measured via satellite pictures) when their landlord and locality chief belong to the same ethnicity. We find opposite effects when residents and chiefs are co-ethnics. Our identification relies on the exogenous appointment of chiefs and is supported by several tests, including a regression discontinuity design. In the third chapter, Christopher Blattman, Horacio Larreguy, Otis Reid, and I study a large randomized controlled trial designed to combat vote-buying in the 2016 Ugandan elections. Our design allows us to estimate how the effects of the campaign against vote-buying vary with local treatment intensity. We find that the campaign did not reduce the extent to which voters accepted cash and gifts from politicians, but that it had large effects on vote shares received by candidates. Consistent with these effects, we show that the campaign diminished the effectiveness of vote-buying transactions by shifting local social norms against vote-selling. / by Benjamin Marx. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Title as it appears in the June 1993 MIT Graduate List: Three essays in the theory of the firm. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Diego Rodriguez. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-171). / This dissertation consists of three essays in the intersection of the theory of international trade and the theory of the firm. The first essay starts by unveiling two systematic patterns in the volume of intrafirm trade. I then show that these patterns can be rationalized in a theoretical framework that combines a Grossman-Hart-Moore view of the firm with a Helpman-Krugman view of international trade. In particular, I develop an incomplete-contracting, property-rights model of the boundaries of the firm, which I then incorporate into a standard trade model with imperfect competition and product differentiation. The model pins down the boundaries of multinational firms as well as the international location of production. Econometric evidence reveals that the model is consistent with other qualitative and quantitative features of the data. In the second essay, I develop a dynamic, general-equilibrium Ricardian model of North-South trade, in which the incomplete nature of contracts governing international transactions leads to the emergence of product cycles. Following the property-rights approach to the theory of the firm, the same force that creates product cycles, i.e. incomplete contracts, opens the door to a parallel analysis of the determinants of the mode of organization. The model is shown to deliver endogenous organizational cycles. I discuss several macroeconomic and microeconomic implications of the model and relate them to the previous literature on the product cycle. The third essay, co-authored with Professor Helpman from Harvard University, provides a theoretical framework for studying global sourcing strategies. In our model, heterogeneous final-good producers choose organizational forms. That is, they choose ownership structures and locations for the production of intermediate inputs. / (cont.) We describe an equilibrium in which firms with different productivity levels choose different ownership structures and supplier locations. We then study the effects of within-sectoral heterogeneity and variations in industry characteristics on the relative prevalence of these organizational forms. The analysis sheds light on the structure of foreign trade within and across industries. / by Pol Antràs. / Ph.D.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. Thesis. 1969. Ph.D. / Vita. / Bibliography: v.2, leaves 926-965. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics and Social Science, 1963. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 338-348). / by Vincent Anthony Fulmer. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-96). / by Owen A. Lamont. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation is a collection of three empirical essays in industrial organization using data from an anonymous retailer. All these chapters examine some facet of consumer behavior. The first chapter estimates demand for store and national brand over-the-counter pain relievers. There is evidence that the substitution patterns between store and national brands are starkly asymmetric- price cuts by national brands steal more share from store brands than store brand price cuts steal share from national brands. Another distinguishing characteristic between store and national brand products is that store brands can be found at only one retailer while national brands are found virtually anywhere. I find that an increase in the number of competing local retailers is associated with an increase (decrease) in store brand (national brand) share, which is consistent with the unique availability of store brands. In the second chapter, I investigate consumer inventory behavior and find that the increase in quantity resulting from a sale is in large part due to stockpiling motives. For example, using field experiment data, the estimated increase in consumption (net of stockpiling) is close to zero for the product categories mouthwash, diapers, and chocolate. I also identify a selection bias when one uses store-level data to estimate the impact of price on quantity. The third chapter evaluates the effectiveness of lowering prices versus just claiming prices are lower on demand, and how this relates to consumer price knowledge. Using a large-scale field test in which we varied both actual price (in the absence of any cue) and claimed price, we find that the response of these two effects is positively correlated. / (cont.) A likely explanation for this positive correlation is that customers simply care more about the prices of some products than others. Also, customers respond more to low prices on items for which they have good price knowledge, but respond more to low price claims when their price knowledge is poor, although this is a second order effect. / by Edward Ku Cho. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. / (cont.) Risk Management have begun implementing strategies to provide commodity price and weather insurance in the developing world. In Chapter 3 (joint with Professor Rob Townsend from the University of Chicago), we examine how shocks to the price of rubber, an important but volatile Thai export commodity, affect the income, consumption and intra-household remittances of rural Thai households. In contrast to related work on rainfall shocks, we find rubber price innovations are not well insured or smoothed--remittances, borrowing and saving play only small roles in ameliorating the effect of these shocks on the consumption of affected households. We argue that differences in the relative persistence of the two types of shocks provide a plausible reason for these divergent findings, drawing on the literature on buffer stock models of consumption behavior and risk sharing with limited commitment. / This thesis consists of three essays at the intersection of banking, corporate finance and macroeconomics. Unifying the essays are two themes: firstly a focus on how firms (Chapter 1 and Chapter 2) and individuals (Chapter 3) insure against, and react to, sources of macroeconomic risk; secondly the role of financial institutions in the transmission of macroeconomic shocks. Turning to specifics, Chapter 1 is a theoretical and empirical examination of risk management behavior amongst small and medium sized firms, in particular firms' choices between fixed and adjustable rate loan contracts. (Although theory suggests small, privately held firms should have strong incentives to engage in risk management, such firms are rarely studied in empirical work.) I develop a simple agency model of risk management behavior, and then present several pieces of empirical evidence that suggest small US firms do use the banking system to help manage interest rate risk, based on microeconomic data on bank dependent US firms. Chapter 2 presents evidence that banking relationships are most valuable to firms during periods of tight credit, in the extreme during a 'credit crunch'. Relationships alleviate delegated monitoring costs; when banks are credit constrained, these costs are extreme, so the informational advantage of relationships is magnified. I develop these intuitions using a simple agency model. Empirical evidence, based on data from a survey of manufacturing firms during the Asian financial crisis, supports the thesis. Several pieces of evidence also suggest my empirical results are not driven by the endogenous nature of bank relationship formation. Financial institutions in co-operation with the World Bank and the International Taskforce on Commodity / by James Ian Vickery. / Ph.D.