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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
21

Essays on Polish emigration

Rosso, A. C. January 2014 (has links)
The thesis has a focus on Polish emigration in the 90s, providing further evidence of the effects of emigration on the labour markets in the sending countries and on the selection of emigrants both from the sending and destination country's perspective. The second chapter analyses emigration from Poland over a period of 10 years, showing empirically that emigration had a positive impact on the labour market by increasing average wages, but also by increasing wages of the skill groups that experienced the highest emigration outflow. The empirical evidence is supported by a simple economic model, according to which wages are determined by the country's production technology that distinguishes between different skill groups, and change as a consequence of the relative change of the supply of labour of a skill group. The third chapter studies the selection of Polish emigrants from the sending country towards two of the main destination countries: the United Kingdom and Germany. Selection of emigrants is explained through the difference in wage inequality in the destination versus the source country. The predictions of the theoretical model are supported in the data and emigrants to the UK are negatively selected with respect to non-emigrants in terms of unobservable characteristics. When considering education, emigrants are more positively selected (against the model's predictions). For Germany, the empirical results do not confirm the prediction of the model and selection is likely to be the product of the immigration policies in place at the time The fourth chapter provides empirical evidence on the performance of Polish emigrants in the labour market in the destination countries studied in the third chapter. Interestingly, after 2004, despite the high level of education, Polish immigrants performed very poorly in the British labour market, while the average conditions of Polish immigrants in Germany improved.
22

Essays on the economics of human capital accumulation

Rizzica, L. January 2014 (has links)
This thesis explores channels through which human capital accumulation can be fostered focusing in particular on education policies. Chapter 1 analyzes the effects of the UK Widening Participation Policies which aim at raising the motivation towards school of teenagers from low socio-economic background. I use a Sharp Regression Discontinuity design to estimate the effects of raising aspirations on college enrollments. The estimates obtained show that the policy had a significant positive impact on pupils' aspirations and on their propensity to stay on in education after the age of 16, but did not affect college enrollment rates except for pupils coming from richer families. To interpret these empirical results I build a model of schooling choice that incorporates non cognitive traits such as aspirations in the ability production function. Chapter 2 again focuses on tertiary education policies and looks at an Italian reform which generated a substantial geographical expansion of tertiary education supply. I implement a Difference-in-Differences analysis and find that the reform significantly increased girls' enrollment rates but not boys'; on the other hand, boys substituted education away from home with education at the local university. These results suggest that girls face some non financial cost of moving away from home which may eventually prevent them from attending college. Chapter 3 analyzes the impact of parental migration on the household investments on the human capital of children left behind. I frame the household decision making problem as a sequential game in which the migrant spouse decides how much remittances to send back and then the one left behind allocates the total available budget according to his preferences. Such model predicts that the migrant anticipates the spouse's choice and manages to offset the possible negative impact on expenditure for children. The model predictions are tested using data from Indonesia.
23

Intended and unintended incentives in social protection programmes : evidence from Colombia and Mexico

Espinosa, S. January 2014 (has links)
This thesis presents an analysis of Social Protection programmes in Colombia and Mexico, and of the way in which they may create incentives for certain types of individual and household behaviour. The first chapter uses a Regression Discontinuity Design to study whether the structure and targeting of the health component of the Colombian welfare system incentivises workers to join the informal labour market. The findings suggest that being eligible to non-contributory health increases the probability of being informal by about 12 percentage points for male heads of household, while being covered by non-contributory health increases it by around 70 percentage points. The second chapter studies how households respond to changes in the benefits of social protection programmes by evaluating the impact of modifying the school grants in the Mexican Conditional Cash Transfer programme Oportunidades. I use data on a randomised control trial which eliminated grants for primary school, increased grants for lower and higher secondary school by 25%, and included a bonus for school attainment. The findings show some unintended decreases in primary school enrolment, and unexpected decreases in school enrolment of 13 to 18 year old boys. However, the school grants increased enrolment for older girls, as would have been expected. Althoug I find that the changes in the delivery of the grants decreased food expenditure for some households, I find no evidence of perverse effects on food security. The final chapter develops and estimates a dynamic structural model to understand the determinants of participation in Mexico's urban Oportunidades. In the model, households make choices on Oportunidades participation, children's school attendance and maternal labour supply taking into account the costs and benefits of complying with the programme conditionalities. I use the model to evaluate two policies that could incentivise participation in Oportunidades: decreasing the time spent travelling to the health centres (which decreases the costs of complying with the health conditionalities), and increasing the school grants (which increases the benefits of complying with the education conditionalities). I find that the largest increase in participation results from the first policy, which increases participation in Oportunidades by up to 15 percentage points.
24

Essays on complementarities in bipartite matching and in policy combination

Montalvao-Machado, J. M. D. C. January 2014 (has links)
This dissertation contains three essays on the implications of complementarities on the equilibrium sorting in the marriage market, and on the optimal bundling of different development policies. This first chapter develops and tests a model of marital sorting on gender-role attitudes and intrahousehold time allocations with search frictions in the marriage market, and endogenous intrahousehold bargaining power. It is shown that individuals develop a marital taste for similar gender culture partners in order to avoid conflict in decision-making within their future households. This incentive for matching assortatively is stronger for individuals anticipating little say in intrahousehold decision-making. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey, it is shown that the ability that a woman has to guide the extensive margin of her labor market supply according to her own gender-role attitudes, is entirely driven by her search for a same-attitudes partner while in the marriage market. The second chapter provides empirical evidence on whether health education and microfinance act as substitutes or complements in reducing neonatal mortality. Identification exploits the randomized placement of a health educational intervention in rural India, stratified by the presence of a pre-existing microfinance intervention, together with the longitudinal dimension of our dataset. We find that the two interventions substituted each other: both were more effective when offered in isolation then when offered together. Further analysis shows that these interventions operated through different and substitutable channels. The health education intervention increased the adoption of hygienic health behaviours in home deliveries, whereas the microfinance intervention increased payments made to traditional birth attendants. These findings challenge the preconceived policy notion that complementarities between these two ingredients for development call for their joint supply. In contrast, they suggest that policy makers may get more out of each by offering them in isolation to their communities. The final chapter analyses a decentralized two-dimensional marriage market model with transferable utility, where individuals’ attributes are uniformly distributed on the unit square. I first show that matching of likes along both dimensions is the competitive equilibrium when the geometric average within-attribute complementarity is greater than the geometric average between-attribute complementarity. A finding that nests, as a special case, Becker’s assortative matching result, and is in contrast to previous literature suggesting that the concept of assortative matching is not well defined in multi-dimensions. I then show that away from their optimal (similar-type) partners, individuals are willing to compensate mismatches on one of the attributes with opposite mismatches on the other attribute. A finding that in turn sheds new light on the trade-offs that individuals make in less than perfectly competitive multidimensional marriage markets, such as those plagued by search frictions.
25

Empirical studies on firm-level innovation

Abramovsky, L. F. January 2015 (has links)
In this dissertation I exploit di erent sources of rich rm-level data to study how rms organise their innovation activities in a world characterised by increasing globalisation and rapid technological change. The empirical analysis presented in this thesis aims to contribute to a robust evidence base to inform public policy. Chapter 2 considers the impact that information and communication technology (ICT) has on observed rms choices over organisational form. It nds that rms that are more ICT-intensive tend to purchase a greater amount of services on the market and are more likely to purchase o shore. Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between the location of private sector R&D labs and university research departments in Great Britain across di erent industries. The strongest evidence for co-location is for foreign-owned pharmaceutical labs and frontier chemistry research departments consistent with multinationals sourcing technology internationally. Chapter 4 extends the analysis of the previous chapter by using continuous measures of spatial proximity for the analysis of co-location of R&D labs and universities and by considering rm-university interactions directly. Chapter 5 provides a set of novel facts about EU pharmaceutical patenting rms engaged in the use of foreign inventors for drug discovery activity. It explores dimensions of rm-level heterogeneity similar to the ones used to analyse trade patterns. These are also shown to be a key feature in the internationalisation of inventors. Chapter 6 provides evidence on how changes in the employment of high-skilled workers (inventors) in a foreign location a ect a rm's domestic employment of the same type of worker. It nds evidence consistent with the idea that foreign and domestic inventors are complementary in the production of knowledge.
26

Essays on the economics of crime

Schnabel, M. January 2014 (has links)
This thesis considers public policy effects on crime in Sweden using extensive administrative register data on all convictions in Sweden between 1973-2010. First, it explores the impacts of the Swedish compulsory schooling reform that took place between 1949-1962 on individual crime of the generation directly targeted by the education reform. Then it considers the intergenerational effect of this education policy on crime. Policies are often evaluated on either short term outcomes or just in terms of their effect on individuals directly targeted. If such policies shift outcomes across generations their benefits may be much larger than originally thought. This study provides novel evidence on the intergenerational impact of policy by showing that educational reform in Sweden reduced crime rates of the targeted generation and their sons by comparable amounts. The second policy evaluated in this thesis is a liberalization of the opening hours of the Swedish alcohol monopoly outlet stores that took place between 2000- 2001. This study distinguishes itself from existing studies by mapping out an age-specific policy impact on crime for all ages and for a broad set of types of crimes. Whether and how alcohol policies shift criminal outcomes differently for different ages and type of crimes is not well established. The liberalized opening hours of outlet stores had very heterogeneous effects on crime by age and type of crimes. It reduced overall crime rates for male teenagers by 15-20 percent, mainly driven by reductions in drugs and property offences. Men in their mid-thirties also experience a substantial reduction of overall crime rates by 9 percent that comes from reductions in other crimes category and traffic crimes. While a strong increase of 10 percent in the crime rate for men in their early to mid-twenties can be mainly attributed towards a large increase in drug offences.
27

Essays on the economics of universal child care programmes, maternal labour supply and fertility

Raute, A. C. January 2014 (has links)
In my thesis I focus on the economic impacts of public policy. I apply micro-econometric techniques to develop a better understanding of whether maternity leave benefi ts do a ffect women's fertility decisions and whether the development of children can be a ffected by universal child care programmes. In the second chapter, I assess the eff ects of changes in financial incentives on fertility arising from a reform in parental leave benefi ts, which increased the financial incentives to have a child for higher-earning women considerably. I find positive statistically significant effects on fertility. My findings suggest that earnings dependent parental bene fits, which compensate women for their opportunity cost of childbearing accordingly, might be a successful means to increase the fertility rate of high-skilled and higher-earning women and to reduce the disparity in fertility rates with respect to mothers' education and earnings. In the third chapter, I study the e ffeect of a German universal child care programme (aimed at 3- to 6-year-olds) on school readiness indicators. I draw on unique administrative data for the entire population of children who are about to start school in one large region. I finnd that longer public child care attendance robustly improves overall school readiness for children of immigrant ancestry. The finndings suggest that universal child care programmes help to narrow the achievement gap between children of immigrant and native ancestry. In the fourth chapter, I estimate marginal returns to child care attendance. I find substantial heterogeneity in the returns to early child care attendance with respect to variables observed and unobserved (by the researcher). Children who are least likely to attend child care early benefi t the most from early child care attendance. The findings imply that alternative policies, such as extending the availability of child care further or adjusting the admission criteria through quotas, would potentially have high returns.
28

Essays in the evaluation of human capital investment policies

Lopez Garcia, I. January 2015 (has links)
In this thesis dissertation, I study which factors drive human capital investments at different stages of the life-cycle by using structural dynamic behavioral models, and what we can learn from these models in order to design better labor and education policies in the long-term. Over the three chapters of this work I assess policy relevant questions that are either related to both developing and developed countries, and I show how these methodologies can be used in conjunction with other more traditional approaches to perform two types of policy evaluation: the assessment of existing policies, or ex-post policy evaluation, and the prediction of economic behavior under policies that have not been yet implemented, or ex-ante policy evaluation. My work has two main goals. The first goal is methodological. I show the gains of structural modeling in understanding the mechanisms behind human capital investments, for example the disentanglement of preferences, returns and expectations, and the importance of dynamics. I also show how these models can be complemented and even better identified when they are combined with experimental data. The second goal is to answer some relevant economic questions for which there are still no answers. On one hand, I study the determinants of labor informality and self-employment in developing countries disentangling the role of comparative advantage and labor market segmentation on labor informality. On another hand, I study the determinants of parental investments in children and their effects in child development, first emphasizing the role of parental income and financial constraints, and then focusing on less investigated factors like parental beliefs and attitudes towards child-rearing.
29

Essays on intra-household resource control, subjective expectations and human capital investment

Armand, A. January 2014 (has links)
Empowering women and understanding its role within households is one of the main policy objectives in the developing world. However, while there is con- sensus on this objective, there is still little evidence on which is the most efficient way to approach this issue. The PhD thesis is based on understanding whether a variation in intra-household control of resources has an effect on household outcomes in developing countries and whether this effect is related to subjective expectations. This research question is approached using empirical microeconom- ics methods. Chapter “The Marriage market and intra-household allocation of expenditure” tests the assertion that the status of the marriage market impacts on intra-household allocation of expenditures. Chapter “Validation of Subjective expectations” analyses the validity of questions related to subjective expecta- tions using the data collected among social financial recipients in the Republic of Macedonia during the 2010 and 2012 data collection waves of the Macedo- nian “Secondary School Conditional Cash Transfer” evaluation household survey. Chapter “Parental perceived returns to schooling and human capital investment” analyses how parental subjective expectations about the return to schooling of their children affect future decisions about schooling. Chapter “Who wears the trousers in the family?” studies how the interaction between intra-household al- location of resources and expected returns to schooling influences human capital investment among poor households.
30

Empirical essays on the economics of public policy

Jaitman, L. G. January 2014 (has links)
This thesis addresses highly relevant institutional reforms and policies that are of great public concern both in the developing and developed world. It comprises three empirical essays that analyse the impact of institutional arrangements on outcomes of interest. First, the thesis studies the effect of voting laws in terms of equity and its implications for electoral participation. Then it analyses a sentencing reform: the effect of tougher sanctions on crime. Finally, it studies an immigration reform (the recent expansion of the EU) and its impact on crime. The main difficulty to empirically analyse these type of questions is finding a suitable identification strategy to address the causal effect of institutional arrangements on outcomes of interest. In the three papers different advanced micro-econometric techniques are employed in natural experiments or quasi-experimental settings to circumvent this main identification problem of causal inference. The essays show that the institutional reforms studied have important effects on relevant outcomes that are crucial for assessing issues related to governance and crime patterns. Voters are rational and respond to electoral arrangements and therefore the composition of the electorate is deeply affected by electoral laws. Criminals also seem to act rationally and strategically and respond to tougher sanctions, choosing when and which types of crimes to commit. And when exploring the effect of a big immigration wave, this thesis finds that unlike what public opinion seems to claim, there is no conclusive evidence that immigration causes crime in the last decade in UK. There are still many avenues for future research on the economics of public policies, that are critical for the understanding of the behaviour of citizens and the political economy governing collective action.

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