Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Christopher Charles Tilly. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays on economic development and trade in India. Chapter 1 uses the sharp trade liberalization in India in the early 1990s, spurred to a large extent by external factors, to measure the causal impact of trade liberalization on poverty and inequality in districts in India. Variation in pre-liberalization industrial composition across districts in India and the variation in the degree of liberalization across industries allow for a difference-in-difference approach, establishing whether certain areas benefited more from, or bore a disproportionate share of the burden of liberalization. In rural districts where industries more exposed to liberalization were concentrated, poverty incidence and depth decreased by less as a result of trade liberalization, a setback of about 15 percent of India's progress in poverty reduction over the 1990s. The findings are related to the extremely limited mobility of factors across regions and industries in India. Indeed, in Indian states where inflexible labor laws impeded factor reallocation, the adverse impact of liberalization on poverty was more pronounced. The findings, consistent with a specific factors model of trade, suggest that to minimize the social costs of inequality, additional policies may be needed to redistribute some of the gains of liberalization from winners to those who do not benefit as much. Creating a flexible institutional environment will likely minimize the need for additional interventions. Using a panel of firm-level data, Chapter 2 examines the effects of India's trade reforms on firm productivity in the manufacturing sector, focusing on the interaction between this policy shock and firm and environment characteristics. / (cont.) The rapid and comprehensive tariff reductions-part of an IMF-supported adjustment program with India in 1991-allow us to establish a causal link between variations in inter-industry and inter-temporal tariffs and consistently estimated firm productivity. Specifically, I find that reductions in trade protectionism led to higher levels and growth of firm productivity, with this effect strongest for private companies. Interestingly, state-level characteristics, such as labor regulations, investment climate, and financial development, do not appear to influence the effect of trade liberalization on firm productivity. Chapter 3, coauthored with my advisor Esther Duflo, studies the impact of reservation for women on the performance of policy makers and on voters' perceptions of this performance. Since the mid 1990's, one third of Village Council head positions in India have been randomly reserved for a woman: In these councils only women could be elected to the position of chief. Village Councils are responsible for the provision of many local public goods in rural areas. Using a data set which combines individual level data on satisfaction with public services with independent assessments of the quality of public facilities, we compare objective measures of the quantity and quality of public goods, and information about how villagers evaluate the performance of male and female leaders. Overall, villages reserved for women leaders have more public goods, and the measured quality of these goods is at least as high as in non-reserved villages. Moreover, villagers are less likely to pay bribes in villages reserved for women. / (cont.) Yet, residents of villages headed by women are less satisfied with the public goods, including goods that are beyond the jurisdiction of the Panchayat. This may help explain why women rarely win elections even though they appear to be at least as effective leaders along observable dimensions, and are less corrupt. / by Petia Topalova. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1989. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Pang-Hua Kevin Chang. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, June 2011. / "June 2011." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis focuses on the study of different aspects of income inequality across and within countries. In the first chapter, I study how the optimal provision of human capital is distorted in the presence of borrowing constraints and private information on talent and wealth. It shows that elitist, non-merit based, access to higher education can be constrained optimal in poor and unequal countries. The second chapter documents how the IT revolution has changed the patterns of North-South trade and analyzes its effects on wage inequality. It provides theoretical and empirical results on wage polarization and a changes in the pattern of specialization. Finally, the third chapter provides a framework for estimating technological diffusion across countries. The framework is applied to study the diffusion of major technologies across the world since the Industrial Revolution. It is shown that differences in technology diffusion in the last two hundred years can account for two thirds of current income per capita differences. / by Martí Mestieri. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 119-123). / The first essay explains why credit contracts in developing countries are often denominated in foreign currencies, even after many of these economies succeeded in controlling inflation. I propose a new interpretation based on the demand for insurance against real aggregate shocks. The fact that devaluations occur more frequently in adverse states of the world provides a motive for holding dollar assets when the risk of recession is the main source of volatility in consumption. The model predicts persistence in the degree of "dollarization" in economies with low inflationary risk. The second essay looks at how the government's lack of commitment technology affects the capacity of resident agents to optimally diversify risk. I find that government's moral hazard introduces a trade-off between pooling idiosyncratic risk and diversifying aggregate country uncertainty. As a result, local agents face excessive consumption risk. This paper also explores how institutions can be designed as to overcome this moral hazard problem. The third essay proposes an explanation for the variation across countries in the quality of the institutions governing the financial. The explanation based on the proportion of local investors participating in the domestic financial sector. / (cont.) I find that the participation of local investors in the financial market and, correspondingly, the resulting institutions vary according to wealth distribution and the size of capital inflows. / by Veronica E. Rappoport. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 111-114). / This thesis explores the economics of online labor markets. The first paper evaluates a market intervention that sought to improve efficiency within the world's largest online labor market. The second paper provides an illustration of how online labor markets can serve as a platform for helping researchers study economic questions using natural field experiments. The third paper examines the role of supervision within a firm using detailed productivity data. In the first paper, we report the results of an experiment that increased job application costs in an online labor market. More specifically, we made it costlier to apply to jobs by adding required questions to job applications that were designed to elicit high-bandwidth information about workers. Our experimental design allows us to separate the effect of a costly ordeal vs. the role of information by randomizing whether employers see workers' answers. We find that our ordeal reduced the number of applicants by as much as 29% and reduced hires by as much as 3.6%. Overall, the applicant pool that underwent the ordeal had higher earnings and hourly wages, but not better past job performance. The ordeal also discouraged non-North American workers. We find no evidence that employers spent more when vacancies were filled, but some evidence that employer satisfaction improved. These improvements were the result of information provision rather than selection. Finally, we did not find any heterogeneity in outcomes across job category, contract types, or employer experience. In the second paper, we conduct the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship between the "meaningfulness" of a task and worker effort. We employed over 2,500 workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market, to label medical images. Although given an identical task, we experimentally manipulated how the task was framed. Subjects in the meaningful treatment were told that they were labeling tumor cells in order to assist medical researchers, subjects in the zero-context condition (the control group) were not told the purpose of the task, and, in stark contrast, subjects in the shredded treatment were not given context and were additionally told that their work would be discarded. We found that when a task was framed more meaningfully, workers were more likely to participate. We also found that the meaningful treatment increased the quantity of output (with an insignificant change in quality) while the shredded treatment decreased the quality of output (with no change in quantity). We believe these results will generalize to other short-term labor markets. Our study also discusses MTurk as an exciting platform for running natural field experiments in economics. In the third paper, we investigate whether greater supervision translates into higher quality work. We analyze data from a firm that supplies answers for one of the most popular question-and- answer ("Q&A') websites in the world. As a result of the firm's staffing process, the assignment of supervisors to workers is as good as random, and workers are exposed to supervisors who put forth varying degrees of "effort" (a measure based on a supervisor's propensity to correct work). Using this exogenous variation, we estimate the net effect of greater supervision and find that a one-standard-deviation increase in supervisor effort reduces the number of bad answers by between four and six percent. By decomposing the total effect into the separate effects on corrected and uncorrected answers, we conclude that supervisor effort tends to lower the number of good answers among uncorrected answers. Interestingly, observable worker behaviors (i.e., answer length and time to answer a question) seemed unaffected by supervision. None of the results vary with worker experience. / by Dana Chandler. / Ph. D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / My dissertation explores the political behavior of different groups, including immigrants, the youth, and uneducated and marginalized citizens - focusing on their registration and turnout decisions, as well as vote choices, political interest, and competence. I conducted three randomized field experiments in France and combined public electoral records with comprehensive phone and in person surveys to address the following questions: 1) What factors, including costs, information, and attitudes explain people's failure to register and vote, as well as their choice to vote for an extremist party, and 2) How do institutions and political campaigns affect these factors? In many countries (including the US) citizens must register before voting. The first chapter, coauthored with Céline Braconnier (Universite de Cergy-Pontoise) and Jean-Yves Dormagen (Universite Montpellier 1), provides experimental evidence on the impact of this additional hurdle on the size and composition of the electorate. Prior to the 2012 French presidential and parliamentary elections, 20,500 households were randomly assigned to one control or six treatment groups. Treatment households received home canvassing visits providing either information about registration or help to register at home. We show that France's registration requirements have significant effects on turnout and disproportionately discourage marginalized citizens on the left of the political spectrum. While both types of visits increased registration and turnout, the home registration visits had a higher impact than the information-only visits, indicating that both information costs and administrative costs are barriers to registration. Visits paid closer to the registration deadline were also more effective, suggesting that registration requirements' effects are reinforced by procrastination. Our design allows us to distinguish selection and treatment effects of home registration. We find that home registration included additional citizens who were only slightly less likely to vote than those who would have registered anyway, and did not reduce turnout among the latter. On the contrary, citizens induced to vote due to the visits also became more interested in the elections. Overall, these results suggest that the reduction of registration requirements could substantially increase political participation and improve representation of marginalized groups without debasing the average level of competence and informedness among voters. Immigrants in Europe have a low sense of national belonging that affects their well-being and social cohesion in the receiving societies. This low sense of belonging is often interpreted as the result of low socioeconomic status, lack of efforts to integrate, or stigmatization. The second chapter, coauthored with Guillaume Liegey, provides empirical evidence for a complementary theory centered on the paucity of outreach efforts extending a hand to immigrants. During the 2010 French regional elections, 1,350 buildings hosting 23,836 citizens were randomly assigned to receive canvassers' visits. Supporting our theory, the visits had a larger effect on immigrants' turnout than on the mainstream population, although their propensity to vote was initially similar. More broadly, exploring heterogeneous effects of an identical encouragement to vote is shown to usefully complement comparisons of turnout levels to assess the influence of factors such as immigrant origin and race on electoral participation and integration. Since the turn of the century, political campaigns have devoted increasing resources to door-to-door canvassing, in response to compelling evidence about the impact on voter turnout. However, we lack clear evidence on the impact of door-to-door canvassing on electoral outcomes, since unlike participation vote choice cannot be measured at the individual level with administrative records. The third chapter answers this important question with a countrywide precinct-level randomized experiment in France. During the 2012 presidential elections, 22,500 precincts and 17.1 million citizens were randomly allocated to either a control group or a treatment group. Treatment precincts were targeted by canvassers supporting Francois Hollande, the left-wing Parti Socialiste's candidate. The effects are estimated using official electoral results at the precinct level. The visits did not affect voter turnout, but they reduced the vote share of the far-right political party's candidate and increased Hollande's vote share at the first round. Overall, they contributed to one fourth of his victory margin at the second round. The effects persisted in the subsequent parliamentary elections, suggesting that they were obtained by persuading medium and high-propensity voters to vote left, rather than by mobilizing left-wing nonvoters and demobilizing opponents. The results suggest that personal contact can be an effective way for political parties to reconnect with disgruntled citizens and to win their votes.. / by Vincent Pons. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-145). / by Koen Vermeylen. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2012. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 217-226). / This dissertation consists of four chapters exploring how organizations inform and distort the implementation of public policy in two empirical settings. Chapters 1 and 2 study the non-market allocation of research funding to scientists while Chapters 3 and 4 examine the market for schools and school leaders. Experts are likely to have more information regarding the potential of projects in their area, but are also more likely to be biased. Chapter 1 develops a theoretical and statistical framework for understanding and separately identifying the effects of bias and information on expert evaluation and applies it in the context of peer review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I use exogenous variation in review committee composition to examine how relationships between reviewers and applicants, as measured by citations, affect the allocation and efficiency of grant funding. I show that, due to bias, each additional related reviewer increases the chances that an applicant is funded by 2.9 percent. Reviewers, however, are also more informed about the quality of proposals from related applicants: the correlation between scores and quality is approximately 30 percent higher for related applicants. On net, the presence of related reviewers improves the quality of research that the NIH supports by two to three percent, implying that reductions in conflicts of interest may come at the direct cost of reducing the quality of funding decisions. In Chapter 2, I examine how women are treated in grant review at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH). Analyzing funded R01 grants, I show that women receive a half-percentile worse score than men for research that produces the same number of publications and citations. Allowing reviewers to observe applicant gender reduces the number of women who are funded by approximately 3 percent. Analysis of study sections shows that the presence of women attenuates bias, suggesting that diversity in study sections can improve peer review. Chapter 3 considers the effect of labor market for school leaders. School accountability may affect the career risks that school leaders face without providing commensurate changes in pay. Since effective school leaders likely have significant scope in choosing where to work, these uncompensated risks may limit the ability of low-performing schools to attract and retain effective leaders. This paper analyzes the effect of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) on principal mobility and the distribution of high-performing principals across low- and high-performing schools. I show that NCLB decreases average principal quality at schools serving disadvantaged students by inducing more able principals to move to schools less likely to face NCLB sanctions. Finally, Chapter 4 explores the viability of voucher base school market reforms by estimating the demand elasticity for private schooling using variation from sibling discounts at Catholic schools. Because families differ in their number and spacing of children, this variation allows us to isolate within-neighborhood variation in tuition prices. We find that a standard deviation decrease in tuition prices increases the probability that a family will send its children to private school by one half percentage point, which translates into an elasticity of Catholic school attendance with respect to tuition costs of -0.19. Our subgroup results suggest that a voucher program would disproportionately induce into private schools those who, along observable dimensions, are unlike those who currently attend private school. / by Danielle Li. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-104). / This thesis evaluates whether two market-based educational reforms, charter schools and educational vouchers, have led to better student outcomes for both the students who participate them and for students in public schools around them. In Chapter l, I estimate the effects of Michigan charter schools on student achievement for both the students attending them and students at neighboring public schools. Adjusting for previous test scores, I find that charter students do no better and may actually do worse than public school students. I also find that Michigan charter schools have had little or no effect on test scores in neighboring public schools. In Chapter 2, I estimate the effects of Colombia's high school voucher program. Between 1992 and 1997, the Colombian government awarded vouchers to over 100,000 poor students. Most of these vouchers were awarded randomly. Using the randomization to eliminate selection bias, I estimate the effects of the vouchers on participating students. The results suggest voucher winners had higher grade completion, lower repetition rates, a higher probability of taking the college entrance exam, and higher test scores. In Chapter 3, I study the effects of private school scholarships on disadvantaged, elementary students in Michigan. I find that the scholarship did not have a significant effect on the likelihood that a student attends private schools. Students who applied for this scholarship were planning to attend private schools anyway. / by Eric P. Bettinger. / Ph.D.