La Tunisie connaît une progression notable de ses dépenses de santé et de l’espérance de vie des tunisiens. Mais ces résultats vont de pair avec des inégalités dans l’accès aux soins, motivant une réforme de l’assurance maladie mise en place en 2007. Les principaux changements visent une amélioration de la couverture pour les maladies chroniques et une généralisation de l’assurance pour l’offre de soins privée. Cette thèse de micro-économétrie appliquée examine l’impact de la réforme sur l’accès aux soins et le reste à charge des individus. Les évaluations sont réalisées sur des enquêtes visant plusieurs milliers d’individus en 2005 et 2010. On présente les motivations de la réforme, avant d’analyser le choix d’assurance et son influence sur le recours aux fournisseurs de soins publics ou privés en 2010, après la réforme. Une évaluation de cette réforme a été analysée à l’aide de l’approche de différences de différences. Au total, les résultats obtenus montrent que cette réforme semble avoir atteint plusieurs de ses objectifs : amélioration de l’accès aux soins pour les affiliés à la Caisse Nationale de Sécurité Sociale (CNSS), meilleur accès aux soins privés, baisse des restes à charges et des dépenses catastrophiques pour les personnes affectées d’une maladie chronique. / Tunisia experiences a noticeable growth in health expenditures and in Tunisians’ life expectancy. However, there are inequalities in health care access that motivated a reform of the health insurance which took place in 2007. The main changes were the improvement of the coverage for chronic diseases and the expansion of the access to insurance for care provided in the private sector. This PhD uses a micro econometric approach to examine the impact of this reform on access to health care and the out of pocket (OOP) born by individuals. The estimations are implemented on two surveys realized in 2005 and 2010 and relative to several thousand individuals. We first present the motivations of the reform. Then we analyze the individual insurance choice and its influence on the use of public or private care providers in 2010, i.e. after the reform. To evaluate this reform, we use a double difference approach. In total, our results show that the 2007 reform has attained many of its objectives: improvement of health care access for National Social Security Fund’s (NSSF) members, better access for private health care, decrease of OOP and catastrophic health expenses for individuals with chronic diseases.

A literatura empírica em economia do trabalho mostra que o tamanho do empregador afeta positivamente o salário de seus trabalhadores. O presente trabalho utiliza uma especificação empírica da equação salarial que inclui efeitos fixos para os trabalhadores, para o empregador e para a qualidade do match entre eles, de modo que explicações teóricas para a existência do efeito do tamanho do empregador possam ser testadas sem que vieses de variável omitida prejudiquem as conclusões. Esta especificação com três efeitos fixos ainda não foi utilizada na literatura empírica do efeito salarial do tamanho do empregador. Os resultados indicam que mais da metade do efeito do tamanho do empregador é explicado pela correlação do tamanho com as três heterogeneidades não observáveis e que devemos rejeitar a validade empírica das explicações fornecidas pelos modelos teóricos testados de forma geral. Contudo, ressaltamos que tais modelos podem se aplicar em circunstâncias específicas. / Economists have persistently found a positive relationship between the employer size and the wage earned by employees. This paper uses an empirical specification that controls for unobserved heterogeneity at three levels: worker, employer and match quality, for the first time in this literature. Thus, theoretical explanations of the employer size effect can be tested with estimation results that are not biased due to omitted variable problems. We show that more than half of the employer size effect is explained by the correlation between the employer size and the three heterogeneities. The results also suggest that we should reject the tested theoretical models as general explanations of the employer size effect. However, these models may explain the effect in some circumstances.

Este trabalho considera uma relação de risco moral em que as ações correntes do agente exercem um efeito persistente sobre os lucros futuros da firma, e investiga as implicações desta persistência sobre o desenho de seus títulos financeiros e sua política de investimentos. A partir de um modelo agente-principal em tempo contínuo, o contrato ótimo é implementado por meio de uma estrutura de capital sob a qual o agente controla tanto a política de investimento, quanto a de dividendos. O processo de investimento resultante segue uma média dependente do marginal, mas apresenta desvios desta em função dos lucros inesperados. Com isso, os investimentos da firma se mostram sensíveis a seus fluxos de caixa, de tal forma a fazer com que esta sensibilidade revele ao principal a informação que o agente detém de forma assimétrica. Por sua vez, o cupom pago pelos títulos de dívida emitidos pela firma não depende, contemporaneamente, desta informação assimétrica, mas apenas de forma defasada, quando esta então já fora devidamente revelada aos investidores por meio das variações de tamanho da firma. / This thesis considers a moral hazard relationship in which the agent current actions have a persistent effect on the future firm\'s profits, and investigates the implications of this persistence on the design of its financial securities and investment policy. From a principal-agent model in continuous time, the optimal contract is implemented through a capital structure under which the agent controls both the investment and dividends policy. The resulting investment process follows a mean dependent on the firm marginal , but shows deviations from that mean in function of the firm\'s unexpected profits. Thus, the firm\'s investments are sensitive to its cash flows, so to make this sensitivity reveals to the principal the information that the agent holds asymmetrically. In turn, the coupon paid by the firm debt does not depend, contemporaneously, on this asymmetric information but only so when it had been properly disclosed to investors by means of changes in firm size.

In 2014, Colorado and Washington legalized the cultivation, sale, and consumption of recreational marijuana for anyone over the age of 21. In doing so, the two states presented the first opportunities for marijuana-specific tourism in the United States. Direct benefits of legalization to these first movers, namely tax revenues generated through the sale of marijuana, have been quantified, but the indirect benefits in the tourism sector are as of yet unquantified. Although there is a large body of informal literature and popular media on marijuana tourism, academic study of the subject is scant. Working with a panel composed of 47 of the contiguous United States over the years 2005-2016, this study utilizes a synthetic control methodology to construct hypothetical time series for various tourism indicators for the cases of non-legalization in Colorado and Washington. Comparison of these hypothetical time series to the actual time series reveals the effects of legalization. A similar methodology is applied to all states to find the “placebo effects” and to establish significance. In traveler expenditures, traveler-generated taxes, tourism industry employment, and tourism industry payroll, Washington shows effects of legalization of greater magnitude and significance than those in Colorado. Only 8% of other states show an effect on tourism revenues as large as that of Washington. Additionally this study finds that each state can be approximated with a weighted average of a small group of peers and that weather, price, and an interacted migration and political orientation variable have low predictive power on tourism indicators. Lastly, this study suggests possible causes and policy implications of the discrepancy between the states.

This paper studies the effects of auction mechanisms on the average price of auction results of Shanghai car license plate from 2004 to 2018. We construct two linear regression models and find that an iterated multi-unit auction has a lower efficiency than a seal-bid discriminatory multi-unit auction. We also find that the pre-set price-ceiling is positively correlated with the average winning price. These results suggest that the government can potentially manipulate auction results through the design of the auction mechanism, and through the setting of warning price as a price ceiling.

<div>The following dissertation presents three, stand-alone chapters on incentives and organization in the analysis of public policy. The first two chapters use administrative data from the court system of North Carolina to (1) provide evidence of strategic scheduling decisions for felony cases around judicial rotations and (2) evaluate a wide range of alternative measures of judicial severity, a common methodology used in random judge assignment for evaluation of sentencing on recidivism and in the broader field of scoring and third-party evaluation. The first chapter presents a variety of tests for strategic scheduling, finding systematic variation in the disposition of cases by judges in their election district and by defendant gender. The second chapter presents coefficients from two-stage least squares estimates of the effect of incarceration, probation, and sentence length on recidivism, finding broadly consistent results in direction, but with a significant degree of variation in point estimates and confidence interval size. In addition, alternative indexes sometimes pass and sometimes fail balance and monotonicity tests. Finally, evidence is presented that there are multidimensional elements to judicial propensities around sentence type and sentence intensity, indicating that a single severity index may miss important variations in judge types that are meaningful to defendant outcomes. The third chapter uses data from the 1992 to 2017 Censuses of Agriculture to evaluate the impact of the Land Contract Guarantee Pilot Program (LCGP) on the share of new farmers in counties across the United States. Estimates of shares of new farmers from a difference-in-differences model are then used to assess the impact of new farmers on aggregate measures of farm capital and federal program participation. In general, the LCGP has a significant and positive effect on the share of new farmers. Counties with higher shares of new farmers are less likely to participate in federal conservation programs and have lower total machinery assets. An event study approach that includes data from 2017, when the LCGP was expanded nationwide, confirms positive effects from the program, but offers conflicting views on farm capital and program participation. It is suggested that this is likely a result of additional programs put in place in the 2014 Farm Bill, and future research is proposed to address this conflicting sign.</div>

My dissertation investigates financial sector development, economic growth and stability through the analysis of Chinese and international evidence. My first chapter is the introduction. The second chapter investigates the effects of Chinese financial and fiscal policies on the Chinese economic recovery in the 2008 economic stimulus Plan, covering the period from the Great Recession to 2014. This chapter explores the effects of the increase in bank credit growth with significant strain of banking health on firm-level output, employment and investment. The results demonstrate that the increase in government expenditure due to the fiscal policies has the significant effects on the very same firm-level indicators. The effects of such policies are shown to depend on firm characteristics such as size, liability ratio, profitability, ownership and industry. Regarding the dynamic effects of the policies, it is documented that the roles of Chinese financial and fiscal policies are effective but temporary on the Chinese economic recovery within about 2 years. In the third chapter, I investigate the effects of financial sector development on the growth volatility by using the data of 50 countries. The empirical results show that the aggregate growth volatility declines from 1997 to 2014 in the global perspective while the advanced countries have much smaller growth volatility than the developing countries. Using the dynamic panel threshold model, I find that financial sector development significantly reduces growth volatility, especially in its lower regime. Financial sector development magnifies the shock of inflation volatility towards growth volatility in its higher regime. My results reveal the importance of keeping financial sector development at an optimal level, which is beneficial to reduce aggregate fluctuations and dampen the inflation shocks. The fourth chapter examines the asymmetric roles of bank credit on the business cycle by using international evidence. The empirical results present that bank credit is pro-cyclical and amplifies the business cycle. This effect is larger in the economic peak and trough, which forms a U-shaped curve. The U-shaped influences are robust for alternative financial factors, including M2 supply and stock price. This paper contributes to explore the distinct roles of bank credit on the economy in different business cycle phases.

We begin with the outlining the motivation of this research as there are still so many unanswered research questions on our complex financial and economic systems. The philosophical background and the advances of econometrics and econophysics are discussed to provide an overview of the stochastic and nonstochastic modelling and these disciplines are set as a central theme for the thesis. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of financial econometrics models such as Gaussian, ARCH (1), GARCH (1, 1) and its extensions as compared to econophysics models such as Power Law model, Boltzmann-Gibbs (BG) and Tsallis Entropy as statistical models of volatility in US S&P500, Dow Jones and NASDAQ stock index using daily data. The data demonstrate several distinct behavioural characteristics, particularly the increased volatility during 1998 to 2004. Power Laws appear to describe the large fluctuations and other characteristics of stock price changes. Surprisingly, these Power Laws models also show significant correlations for different types and sizes of markets and for different periods and sub-periods of markets. The results show the robustness of Power Law analysis, with the Power Law exponent (0.4 to 2.4) staying within the acceptable range of significance (83% to 97%), regardless of the percentage change in the index return. However, the procedure for testing empirical data against a hypothesised power-law distribution using a simple rank-frequency plot of the data and the data binning process can turn out to be a spurious result for the distribution. As for the stochastic processes such as ARCH (1) and GARCH (1, 1) the models are explicitly confined to the conditional behaviour of the data and the unconditional behaviour has often been described via moments. In reality, it is the unconditional tail behaviour that accounts for the tail behaviour and hence, we have to convert the unconditional tail behaviour and express the models as two-dimensional stochastic difference equation using the processes of Starica (Mikosch 2000). The results show the random walk prediction successfully describes the stock movements for small price fluctuations but fails to handle large price fluctuations. The Power Law tests prove superior to the stochastic tests when stock price fluctuations are substantially divergent from the mean. One of the main points of the thesis is that these empirical phenomena are not present in the stochastic process but emerge in the non-parametric process. The main objective of the thesis is to study the relatively new field of Econophysics and put its work in perspective relative to the established if not altogether successful practice of econometric analysis of stock market volatility. One of the most exciting characteristics of Econophysics is that, as a developing field, no models as yet perfectly represent the market and there is still a lot of fundamental research to be done. Therefore, we begin to explore the application of statistical physics method particularly Tsallis entropy to give a new insights into problems traditionally associated with financial markets. The results of Tsallis entropy surpass all expectations and it is therefore one of the most robust methods of analysis. However, it is now subject to some challenge from McCauley, Bassler et. al., as they found that the stochastic dynamic process (sliding interval techniques) used in fat tail distributions is time dependent. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p>Background: Tougher demands from regulators on drugs efficiency and safety,governmental cost cutting and more complex areas of research, has led to that the importance of the pharmaceutical industry’s research pipelines are increasing. Even though the capital markets views on the pharmaceutical industry and its valuation is changing, the authors is not aware of any prior research that has been conducted on the topic of how the market reacts to clinical trial results or how security analysts valuates product pipelines.</p><p>Aim: This thesis aims to explain how security analysts valuate research pipelines and analyze whether the publication of clinical trial results significantly affects the pricing of multinational pharmaceutical companies.</p><p>Methodology: Three econometric models using an aggregate daily data sample of 27 years for five of the world’s largest pharmaceutical firms distinguish the price effects related to the publication of clinical trial results. Three interviews with security analysts map how security analysts value pharmaceutical research.</p><p>Results: Security analysts’ uses a combination of DCF and relative valuation when analyzing pharmaceutical firms. All interviewed analysts uses a risk adjusted net present value approach which is closely linked to the DCF approach, however, financial theory suggests that pipelines should be valuated with contingent claim models Analysts recognize that all compounds in Phase III and some Phase II projects has a impact on firm value. Clinical trials have a significant short-term impact on firm value. Phase III projects shows significant share price influence whilst early stage clinical trials do not, which shows that analysts are correct in focusing their valuation to later stage clinical trials. However, not all areas of therapy have a significant impact on firm value. Oncology is the only area of therapy where successes raises firm value, whilst failures in oncology and cardiovascular/gastrointestinal significantly lower firm value. Negative news about the research portfolio also tends to have a larger impact than positive news.</p>

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