Shek Ming Hon. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-54). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1 --- Income Level and Environmental policy --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2 --- International Trade and Environmental policy --- p.5 / Chapter 2.3 --- Other taxes and Environmental taxation --- p.7 / Chapter 2.4 --- Unemployment --- p.8 / Chapter 2.5 --- Tax and Tax Credits --- p.9 / Chapter 2.6 --- Foreigrt Investment and Environmental policy --- p.9 / Chapter 2.7 --- Pollution and Unemployment --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- The Fr amework --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Resource allocation --- p.21 / Chapter 3.2 --- National Welfare --- p.22 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Optimal Capital Taxes --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Optimal Environmental Taxes --- p.26 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Jointly Optimal Policies --- p.29 / Chapter 3.3 --- Tariff Liberalization and Taxes --- p.33 / Chapter 4 --- Trade and pollution Policies under Investment Tax Credits --- p.35 / Chapter 4.1 --- Welfare Analysis on Capital Tax --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2 --- Welfare analysis on Capital Subsidy --- p.40 / Chapter 4.3 --- Policy in Simultaneous Change --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3.1 --- Capital Tax --- p.41 / Chapter 4.3.2 --- Capital subsidy --- p.45 / Chapter 5 --- Concluding Remarks --- p.48 / Chapter 6 --- Appendix --- p.55 / Chapter 6.1 --- Resource allocation --- p.55 / Chapter 6.2 --- Unemployment effect --- p.57 / Chapter 6.3 --- Cost and benefit of production of good X --- p.58 / Chapter 6.4 --- The 7 ° and s° schedules --- p.58

Chow Kin On. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 106-110). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Motivation --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Contribution --- p.3 / Chapter Chapter Two --- Overview China's Administration System --- p.6 / Chapter 2.1 --- Development of China's System of Administrative Jurisdictions --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Administration System of Zhejiang --- p.15 / Chapter 2.3 --- Administration System of Fujian --- p.19 / Chapter Chapter Three --- Literature Review --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1 --- Advantages and Disadvantages of Province- Administering-County (PAC) System --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2 --- Literature on Prefecture-Level-City-Administering-County (CAC) System --- p.26 / Chapter 3.3 --- Literature on Economic Growth --- p.30 / Chapter Chapter Four --- Methodology --- p.34 / Chapter 4.1 --- Growth Regression Model and Approaches --- p.34 / Chapter 4.2 --- Explanatory Variables --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter Five --- Estimation Results --- p.47 / Chapter 5.1 --- Estimation Results --- p.47 / Chapter 5.2 --- Summary and Interpretation of Estimation Results --- p.53 / Chapter Chapter Six --- Policy Implications and Conclusion --- p.58 / Chapter 6.1 --- Summary of Major Findings --- p.58 / Chapter 6.2 --- Policy Implications --- p.59 / Chapter 6.3 --- Limitation and Possible Extensions --- p.63 / Appendix --- p.65 / Reference --- p.106

Lam Kong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 84-85). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Related Work and Background --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Competition-free Unlimited Capacity Model´ؤOne-hop Case --- p.9 / Chapter 2.2 --- Competition-free Unlimited Capacity Model一Two-hop Case --- p.11 / Chapter 3 --- Extensions to Competition-free Unlimited Capacity Model --- p.13 / Chapter 3.1 --- Optimal Pricing for the One-hop Case under Various Utility Distributions --- p.13 / Chapter 3.2 --- Optimal Pricing for Competition-free Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks --- p.16 / Chapter 3.3 --- The Issue on Network Scaling --- p.22 / Chapter 4 --- Competition-free Limited Capacity Model --- p.28 / Chapter 4.1 --- One-hop Case --- p.28 / Chapter 4.2 --- Multi-hop Case --- p.36 / Chapter 5 --- Unlimited Capacity Model with Price Competition --- p.42 / Chapter 5.1 --- Renewed Game Model for Networks with Price Competition --- p.43 / Chapter 5.2 --- Pricing Equilibriums in Different Network Topologies --- p.46 / Chapter 5.2.1 --- Case A: Two Access Points Competing in a One-hop Network --- p.47 / Chapter 5.2.2 --- Case B: Two Access Points Competing in a Two-hop Network --- p.51 / Chapter 5.2.3 --- Case C: Two Resellers Competing in a Two-hop Network --- p.54 / Chapter 5.2.4 --- Case D: Extending Case A into a Multi-hop Network --- p.60 / Chapter 5.2.5 --- Case E: Extending Case C into a Multi-hop Network. --- p.66 / Chapter 5.2.6 --- The Unified Pricing Equilibrium --- p.68 / Chapter 5.2.7 --- Case F: The Characterizing Multi-hop Network --- p.75 / Chapter 5.3 --- Revisiting the Network Scaling Issue --- p.80 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.82 / Bibliography --- p.84 / Chapter A --- Proof of the PBE for Competition-free Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks --- p.86 / Chapter B --- Proof of the Unified Pricing Equilibrium --- p.92

The following essays examine the nature of product co-production patterns in India—what factors cause these patterns to emerge, and why they are valuable to study. The first chapter establishes a motivation. It takes a measure of product co-production established in the literature—the “proximity” matrix of Hidalgo et al. (2007)—and shows that this measure is an excellent predictor of new product additions by firms and states, even controlling for other potentially relevant explanatory variables. The following chapter employs a reduced-form approach with regression analysis to uncover the factors that could be giving rise to these patterns of co-production. Using this approach, demand complementarities and patterns of input similarity seem to have the most explanatory power for the observed patterns. The final chapter improves the estimation by incorporating product paths and firm profitability into a structural model. We adapt the gravity model of Morales et al. (2015) to our setting to identify costs associated with adding new products based on characteristics of the relationship between the firm and its potential products. In the model, firms seek to expand their product scope into the most profitable products, where this profit is diminished by “distance” they would have to traverse through a characteristic space. Using the moment inequalities method of Pakes et al. (forthcoming), we are able to estimate which dimensions in that space have the greatest effect on firm profits. We find the physical distance to the nearest location of production had the greatest impact, followed by input similarity between their products and potential products.

Pricing practices of firms are an important yet little studied aspect of the price phenomenon in sociology. This study asks the question: Why do different firms, even in the same market, tend to use different pricing practices--value-informed, competition-informed, or cost-informed pricing--to set prices? To answer this question, this study builds a dynamic flocking model of pricing to investigate the inter-dynamics among pricing practices and various market uncertainties. The model shows that each pricing practice is only viable under certain combinations of levels of different market uncertainties. Supporting evidence, theoretical innovations, and practical implications of the model are discussed. Contrary to common intuition, uncertainty, conceptualized as some cognitive tolerance interval, is akin to lubricant, making the otherwise rigid, brittle, and friction-fraught system more smooth, robust, and error-tolerant under certain circumstances. Therefore, uncertainties, and the inter-dynamics among them, should be treated as an endogenous and integral part of the social mechanism at issue, rather than some amorphous “other” external to it.

This dissertation consists of essays studying the impacts of education policies on outcomes measured at three distinct points in the high school to labor force continuum: course taking and academic performance in high school, choice of college and major, and labor market returns to completing college. The chapters are linked by their focus on understanding how these policies affect disadvantaged and under-represented populations, and by their exploitation of exogenous variation in the timing and assignment of treatments to identify causal effects. The first chapter asks whether lack of information about ability helps explain why high-performing students from disadvantaged backgrounds tend to under-invest in their education. In the presence of uncertainty, an information shock may lead individuals to revise their beliefs and decision-making. To explore this question, I examine an individualized signal of academic aptitude known as "AP Potential'' that is provided in Preliminary SAT (PSAT) reports. The signal provides information about students' aptitude for Advanced Placement (AP), a national program that offers college-level courses and exams in high school. In the United States, participation in AP has become a key step on the path to admission into selective four-year colleges. I begin by collecting high-frequency panel data on subjective beliefs from students in Oakland, California. Students stated their expected performance on the PSAT, beliefs about their abilities, and expectations about future academic outcomes before and after receiving their PSAT results reports. This survey data allows me to identify the information shock students experienced from the PSAT. I establish that although the PSAT is, on average, a negative information shock, the AP Potential signal itself contains valuable information: students with the same PSAT score and prior beliefs about own ability who receive the AP Potential signal experience a more positive information shock. The information shock in turn leads students to revise their beliefs about their ability, the number of AP classes they plan to take, and the likelihood that they will attend a four-year college, consistent with a Bayesian updating framework. I focus next on estimating whether the AP Potential signal has a causal effect on the probability of participating in AP and the number of AP classes in which students actually enroll by exploiting the deterministic relationship between PSAT scores and the AP Potential signal in a Regression Discontinuity (RD) design. Both graphical and more formal non-parametric and parametric methods robustly demonstrate that surveyed students on the margin of receiving the signal enroll in approximately one more AP course their junior year, increasing the probability of participation in the AP program by at least 26 percentage points. Given the demographics and performance levels of students at the margin, this effect amounted to increasing the number of high-ability, under-represented high school students taking college-level courses in Oakland. In addition, mismatch between course enrollments and student ability decreased. When I extend this analysis to students in other schools who did not take the survey, I find that the AP Potential signal had no effect on their course enrollment decisions. This finding is equally important, as it indicates that only students who received an explanation of their PSAT results, the AP Potential signal, and ways to use the information exhibited a behavioral response to the signal. The AP Potential message is not especially conspicuous on PSAT reports, so students who were surveyed likely received an intensified treatment. The results suggest that providing a credible, individualized signal of ability is a cost-effective means of increasing human capital investments among disadvantaged students. The second chapter examines how men and women respond to changes in the competitiveness of university admissions. Experimental research has shown that women respond to competition differently than men, which could help explain gender gaps in math performance and selection into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) programs. A growing body of work has found suggestive evidence that these relationships also exist in practical educational settings. However, exogenous variation in competition has been restricted to the experimental literature, leaving the differential causal effects of competitive admissions an open question. An affirmative action policy enacted in Venezuela in 2002 provides a unique opportunity to explore how men and women's academic performance and college application decisions respond to changes in competition. The policy led to exogenous shocks in the competitiveness of the university admissions process, effectively increasing competition for socioeconomically advantaged students and decreasing competition for disadvantaged students. Students who neither belonged to the advantaged nor disadvantaged groups defined by the policy were unaffected and thus served as a control group. I use a triple-difference approach on the universe of college applicants between 1994 and 2007 to estimate the impact of changes in the level of competition on high school GPA, math and verbal test scores, and the selectivity of college applications by gender. My results suggest that men and women respond differently to changes in the competitiveness of university admissions, consistent with experimental evidence. The results indicate that males, in both the advantaged and disadvantaged groups, did not respond to the policy change. Women, on the other hand, responded strongly, improving their performance in GPA and in the verbal test in response to both the increase in competition and the increased incentive to exert effort provided by affirmative action. One of the main findings, however, is that increased competition led to lower math test scores for women, while reduced competition led women to increase their performance in math. A student's goal should be to maximize the academic index used for admissions, which places equal weight on verbal and math scores. Under time constraints, if women believe they are more effective at improving their verbal scores, they should allocate more time to studying for the verbal test, perhaps even allocating too much time away from studying math, which would result in lower math scores. However, only women who experienced higher levels of competition had lower math scores. Women from the disadvantaged group who experienced less competition improved their math scores, as well as their GPA and verbal scores. The second main finding is that women in the disadvantaged group who experienced less competition applied to more selective programs. In particular, the competitiveness of their top-ranked choice, which should reflect their true preference given the assignment mechanism in place, saw the biggest increase, even net of the effect due to their improved performance. Given the persistence of a wage gender gap despite women's higher educational attainment, how competitive admissions influence sorting into specific universities and majors emerges as a key question. The third chapter, which is a joint work with Ruth Uwaifo appearing in the Economics of Education Review, studies how expanding access to higher education affects college graduates once they reach the labor market. We focus on a major university education reform in Venezuela known as Mission Sucre, which provided free, open-access tertiary education targeted to the poor and marginalized, and its potential impact on returns to university education on non-participants. We begin by finding that returns to education decreased in Venezuela over the period Mission Sucre was introduced, despite a previous upward trend and an economic boom. Although returns to all levels of education declined during this period, the return to university education fell by over 10 percentage points more than other levels. Motivated by these preliminary findings, we evaluate the possible role of Mission Sucre on the significant decline in returns to university education. For our main analysis, we compare the returns to university education and technical education in a difference-in-difference strategy. We focus on these particular levels of education because both are tertiary levels and are more likely to have similar general trends in returns. More importantly, Mission Sucre originally focused on only expanding university education. This allows us to classify those with university education as a treatment group and those with technical education as a potential control group. We find that Mission Sucre led to a 2.7 percentage point decrease in returns to university education of non-participants in the 23-28 age cohort between 2007 and 2008, the year the first cohort of Mission Sucre graduates entered the labor force. Further, states with higher shares of Mission Sucre students had a larger decline in the returns to university education. Specifically, a 1 percent increase in the share of Mission Sucre students led to a 0.4 percentage point decline in the returns to university education. Although we provide ample evidence of the impact of Mission Sucre, we cannot state whether the noted effect of the program is driven solely by an excess supply of skilled labor, or a combination of the excess supply and other negative externalities of the program on nonparticipants, such as a change in the perceived overall quality of public higher education. Nevertheless, our results present a cautionary tale of the short-term effects of a rapid and large expansion in access to university education.

This dissertation examines “post-agrarian” transformations in Kenyan rural areas. But where rural transformation is usually written as a story about land, Black Spots is a story about roads. Kenya’s massive investment in roads infrastructure over the last decade has intersected with the decline in smallholder agriculture in such a way that, for many rural residents, fortunes are now imagined on the road rather than on the land. Roadside trade, transport, and even salvage from crashes provide supplementary livings for rural populations facing declining agricultural opportunities. The dissertation argues that in the context of austerity policies and rural abandonment, road work and its “fast money” not only expose roadside residents to physical danger, but also entrench entrepreneurial risk ideology into local imaginaries. With the road accident as a lens illuminating a wider landscape of rural hazard, the dissertation shows how rural residents refashion relationships to land, work, technology, and loss in high-risk environments. At the same time, it demonstrates the limits of “risk”—that is, a calculated engagement with potential loss, conducted in the interest of profit—as a framework for managing contingency. In this sense, Black Spots is both an ethnography of risk and of what risk fails to capture. It tracks how rural residents learn to engage bodily and economic hazard and to understand it as risk; how they coordinate the disparate temporalities and technologies of life on the road and life on the land; and how they withstand loss when these attempts do not go as planned. The dissertation thus advances two parallel concerns: on the one hand, it demonstrates how economic practice is at once bodily and reasoned. On the other, it considers how experiences of and ideas about contingency are shaped in relation to shifting economic, social, and infrastructural possibilities.

Ma Ning. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-57). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.11 / Chapter 2.1 --- Problems about Using Sibling Samples --- p.19 / Chapter 2.2 --- Difficulties with the Within-twin-pair Studies --- p.20 / Chapter 3 --- Method --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1 --- Omitted Variable Bias (Selection Effect) --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- OLS Model --- p.21 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Fixed-Effect Model --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- GLS Model --- p.23 / Chapter 3.2 --- Measurement Error --- p.24 / Chapter 4 --- Data --- p.26 / Chapter 5 --- Results --- p.29 / Chapter 5.1 --- "OLS, Fixed-Effect, GLS and IV estimates" --- p.29 / Chapter 5.2 --- Important findings --- p.34 / Chapter 5.3 --- Further Results --- p.35 / Chapter 5.3.1 --- Consistency of Fixed-Effect Estimate --- p.35 / Chapter 5.3.2 --- Smoking as an Instrument for Education --- p.39 / Chapter 5.3.3 --- Symmetry Test --- p.41 / Chapter 5.3.4 --- Hausman Test --- p.44 / Chapter 5.3.5 --- Selection Bias --- p.45 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusions --- p.48 / Chapter 7 --- Bibliography --- p.49

Huang Chong. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 31-32). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Empirical Strategy --- p.4 / Chapter 3 --- Data --- p.6 / Chapter 4 --- Empirical Results --- p.8 / Chapter 5 --- Potential Biases of Within-twins Estimates and Solutions --- p.10 / Chapter 5.1 --- Potential Biases --- p.10 / Chapter 5.2 --- Remaining Mating Effect in Within-twins Estimation --- p.13 / Chapter 6 --- Further Analysis --- p.14 / Chapter 6.1 --- Difference between Sexes --- p.14 / Chapter 6.2 --- Longer Hours or Better Paid? --- p.16 / Chapter 7 --- Conclusion --- p.17 / Appendix A Effect of Spousal Social Status --- p.19 / Appendix B Stronger cross-productivity when a couple work in same occupation? --- p.21 / Tables --- p.23 / References --- p.31

Feng, Guosen. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-60). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 1.1 --- Background for Network Content Providers' Peering --- p.1 / Chapter 1.2 --- Literature Review --- p.5 / Chapter 2 --- A Static Baseline Model --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1 --- Content Qualities and Subscribing Fees --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- Users' Utilities --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- Providers' Coverages and Revenues --- p.14 / Chapter 2.4 --- Content Procurement Strategies --- p.16 / Chapter 2.5 --- The Peering and Bargaining of Providers --- p.16 / Chapter 2.5.1 --- Peering Agreement --- p.16 / Chapter 2.5.2 --- Change of Coverage --- p.17 / Chapter 2.5.3 --- Providers' Revenues --- p.18 / Chapter 2.5.4 --- Nash Bargaining Problem --- p.18 / Chapter 3 --- Impact of Dynamic Content --- p.23 / Chapter 3.1 --- Additional Investment for Dynamic Content --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.1 --- Content Change --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.2 --- Change of Coverage --- p.24 / Chapter 3.1.3 --- Providers' Revenue --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2 --- Finite Budget for Dynamic Content --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.1 --- Content Change --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.2 --- Change of Coverage --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2.3 --- Providers' Revenue --- p.35 / Chapter 4 --- Peeing in Dynamic Model --- p.36 / Chapter 4.1 --- Peering over T Time Slots --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1.1 --- "Content Change, Advertisement Sharing, and Payment ." --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1.2 --- Change of Coverage --- p.37 / Chapter 4.1.3 --- Providers' Revenue --- p.38 / Chapter 4.1.4 --- Nash Bargaining Problem --- p.38 / Chapter 4.2 --- Peering over One Time Slot --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.1 --- "Content Change, Advertisement Sharing, and Payment ." --- p.45 / Chapter 4.2.2 --- Change of Coverage --- p.46 / Chapter 4.2.3 --- Providers' Revenue --- p.48 / Chapter 4.2.4 --- Nash Bargaining Problem --- p.49 / Chapter 5 --- Summary and Future Work --- p.53 / Bibliography --- p.56 / Chapter A --- Proof of Optimal Peering Strategy --- p.61 / Chapter A.1 --- Proof of Static Optimal Peering Strategy --- p.61 / Chapter A.2 --- Proof of Strategy for Peering over T Time Slot --- p.65 / Chapter A.3 --- Proof of Strategy for Peering over One Time Slot --- p.66