Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf [92]). / by Charlotte A. Wojcik. / Ph.D.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 147-160). / This thesis consists of four chapters on the causes of voter participation. In the first chapter, I study the effects of voting costs through a novel, quasi-experimental design based on geographic discontinuities. I compare parcels and census blocks located near borders between adjacent voting precincts. Units on opposite sides of a border are observationally identical, except for their assignment to different polling locations. The discontinuous assignment to polling places produces sharp changes in the travel distance voters face to cast their ballots. In a sample of nine municipalities in Massachusetts and Minnesota, I find that a 1-standard deviation (.245 mile) increase in distance to the polling place reduces the number of ballots cast by 2% to 5% in the 2012 presidential, 2013 municipal, 2014 midterm, and 2016 presidential primary elections. During non-presidential elections, effects in high-minority areas are three times as large as those in low-minority areas, while no significant difference emerges from the 2012 presidential election. Finally, I use my estimates to simulate the impact of various counterfactual assignments of voters to polling places. I find that erasing the effect of distances to polling places would increase turnout by 1.6 to 4 percentage points and reduce minority participation gaps in non-presidential elections by 11% to 13%. By contrast, the optimal feasible counterfactual boundaries, holding polling locations constant, would result in small changes in the minority participation gap. The second chapter, coauthored with Vincent Pons, tests whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, from canvassers supporting the candidates' party list, or to a control group. While canvassers' visits increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points, candidates' had no impact on participation. Candidates increased their own vote share in the precincts they canvassed, but only at the expense of their running mates. This suggests that their failure to mobilize nonvoters resulted from focusing on securing the preferences of active voters. The third chapter, coauthored with Ludovica Gazze, studies the turnout effects of concurrent elections. We notice that existing models of turnout behavior have different implications when regarding the impact of concurrent elections, both on voter turnout and on the probability of casting a valid ballot. We use a simple theoretical framework to formalize this argument and to derive testable predictions on the effects of concurrent elections. We test these predictions using administrative and survey data from Italy. Exploiting different voting ages for the two Houses of Parliament, we show that eligibility to cast a ballot for the Senate has no impact on turnout or information acquisition. By contrast, high-salience elections increase turnout and the number of valid ballots cast when they concur with lower-salience elections. These findings are consistent with information acquisition costs being relatively low for the lower-salience election, conditional on turning out to vote for the higher-salience one. Moreover, these findings appear inconsistent with social pressure to be seen at the voting booth and voter fatigue playing a prominent role as determinants of turnout and voting behavior. In the fourth chapter, I use county-level administrative data from 1992 to 2014 and a Differences-in-Differences research design to identify and estimate the impact of voter ID laws on turnout, Democratic vote share, and irregular ballots. I find no effect of ID laws on any of these outcomes. All estimates are fairly precise and robust to a number of regression specifications. Estimates of heterogeneous effects by educational attainment, poverty rate and minority presence are similarly supportive of ID laws having no impact on electoral outcomes of any type. / by Enrico Cantoni. / 1. A Precinct Too Far: Turnout and Voting Costs -- 2. Do Interactions with Candidates Increase Voter Support and Participation? -- 3. Turnout in Concurrent Elections -- 4. Got ID? The Zero Effects of Voter ID Laws. / Ph. D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2001. / "June 2001." / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three essays analyzing the economic effects of human capital investments. The first chapter evaluates the effects of a major educational reform in India called Operation Blackboard. The teacher component of Operation Blackboard increased the number of primary school teachers by ten percent. I find that despite substantial misallocation of teachers appointed under the program, on balance the program reduced the prevalence of single-teacher schools and increased the number of teachers per school. Moreover, the program significantly raised primary school completion and literacy for girls but had no effect on boys. Finally, two-stage least squares estimates obtained using the exogenous variation in school quality provided by the program suggest a higher returns to school quality than their ordinary least squares counterparts. The second chapter, co-authored with Hoyt Bleakley, examines the returns to language skills. We take advantage of the fact that younger children learn languages more easily than older children to generate exogenous variation in language skills. We find a significant positive effect of English-language skills on wages among individuals from the 1990 Census who immigrated to the U.S. as children. We control for non-language effects of age at arrival with immigrants from English-speaking countries. Our estimated effect of English-language skills on wages is larger than the effect suggested by estimates that do not correct for endogeneity. Much of this effect appears to be mediated by years of schooling and occupational choice. / (cont.) The third chapter investigates the long-run economic consequences of a labor market withdrawal induced by the Japanese-American internment during World War II. Internees spent an average of three years in internment camps. I use the Hawaiian Japanese, who were not subject to mass internment like the West Coast Japanese, as a control group. I find that the labor market withdrawal lowered the earnings of Japanese-American men twenty-five years afterwards. Additionally, it raised the probability of self-employment, and reduced the probability of holding higher-status occupations. These findings are consistent with the predictions of economic models involving a loss of civilian labor market experience or a loss of advantageous job matches. / by Aimee Chin. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of an empirical chapter, an econometrics chapter, and a theoretical chapter, all of which advance the study of the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care. In Chapter 1, I estimate the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care across the quantiles of the expenditure distribution. My identification strategy relies on family cost sharing provisions that generate differences in marginal prices between individuals who have injured family members and individuals who do not. I use a new censored quantile instrumental variables (CQIV) estimator, which allows me to examine variations in price responsiveness across the skewed distribution of medical expenditure. The CQIV estimator does not require any parametric assumptions to account for individuals who consume zero medical care. Using CQIV, as well as traditional estimators, I find elasticities that are an order of magnitude larger than those in the literature. My CQIV estimates suggest strong price responsiveness among people who spend the most. I find that the price elasticity of expenditure is approximately -2.3, which is stable across the .65 to .95 quantiles of the expenditure distribution. In Chapter 2, Chernozhukov and Kowalski (2008), we develop a censored quantile instrumental variables (CQIV) estimator. The CQIV estimator handles censoring nonparametrically in the tradition of Powell (1986), and it generalizes standard censored quantile regression (CQR) methods to incorporate endogeneity. Our computational algorithm combines a control function approach with the Chernozhukov and Hong (2002) CQR algorithm. Through Monte-Carlo simulation, we show that CQIV performs well relative to Tobit IV in terms of median bias and interquartile range. / (cont.) In Chapter 3, I develop a structural model to estimate the price elasticity of expenditure on medical care. The model relies on deductibles, coinsurance rates, and stoplosses that generate nonlinearities in consumer budget sets. The model generalizes existing nonlinear budget set models by allowing for more than one nonconvex kink. Furthermore, it incorporates censoring as a corner solution. Unlike reduced form models, the model utilizes identification from utility theory, it allows for preference heterogeneity, and it allows for the direct calculation of welfare effects. / by Amanda Ellen Kowalski. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis is a collection of three empirical essays in international finance. The first chapter studies the transmission of monetary policy through the lending channel in a partially dollarized banking system. Taking advantage of the cross-sectional and time-series variation in the individual Mexican bank balance sheets, I find that the deposits and loans of banks with a larger share of foreign deposits are less sensitive to domestic monetary shocks, particularly for small banks. This result is reinforced when foreign monetary shocks and country risk shocks are controlled for. The results also suggest that banks with a larger foreign deposit share are more sensitive to foreign (U.S.) monetary shocks. Finally, these banks are more sensitive to country risk. That is, they are more prone to lose deposits when Brady bond spreads increase, although the size of their loan portfolio is not reduced. The second chapter examines whether bank credit fuels asset prices, using evidence from the Japanese real estate boom during the 1980's. The decline in banks' loans to keiretsu firms is used as the shock to bank real estate credit. The evidence supports using keiretsu loans as an instrument. Financial deregulation allowed large firms to replace bank finance with financing from public markets. The main part determines that those prefectures that experienced a larger loss in their banks' proportion of keiretsu loans experienced a positive increase in real estate lending which fuelled land inflation. An increase of 0.01 in a prefecture's instrumented share of real estate loans for 3 years implies a 28 % higher land inflation rate. The third chapter evaluates the behavior of sovereign credit ratings. This chapter questions the view that credit rating agencies aggravated the Asian crisis by excessively downgrading those countries. I find that ratings are, if anything, sticky rather than excessively procyclical. Assigned ratings exceeded predicted ratings prior to the crisis, mostly matched predicted ratings during the crisis period, and did not increase as much as predictions in the recent period following the crisis. Ratings are also found to react to nonmacroeconomic factors, lagged spreads and default history. / by Nada Mora. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2005. / "September 2005." / Includes bibliographical references. / Long-term care expenditures represent one of the largest uninsured financial risks facing the elderly. Medicaid provides incomplete insurance against these costs: unlimited nursing home benefits with a deductible equal to the savings and income above the means-testing limits. While private insurance is available, fewer than 10 percent of the elderly are currently covered. This thesis explores how the elderly prepare for future nursing home use and the interactions between the private and public insurance systems. Chapter one exploits the state-variation in Medicaid generosity to study the financial response of the elderly to perceived future nursing home needs. I find that the elderly shift their consumption and savings decisions in response to Medicaid. Single households have lower net worth through the median of the distribution due to Medicaid policy. On the other hand, I find that married households do not lower total net worth, but they change their relative holdings of protected and non-protected assets. Chapter two explores the crowd-out effect of the public Medicaid program on demand for private long-term care insurance coverage. We estimate the impact of Medicaid program rules on private long-term care insurance coverage for the elderly. We find small but statistically significant marginal crowd-out effects. / (cont.) Our estimates imply that even a $67,000 decrease in the asset disregard for couples would only increase private long-term care insurance ownership among the elderly by 1.9 percentage points. These findings underscore that marginal reforms to the existing Medicaid program are unlikely to be an effective way of increasing private long-term care insurance coverage among the elderly. Chapter three explores individuals' expectations for future nursing home use. I compare self-reported probabilities to the statistical probability computed with a state-of-the-art model used by the long-term care insurance industry. I find that respondents tend to overestimate unlikely outcomes and underestimate likely outcomes. On average, though, the expectations are very accurate. I find that expectations for nursing home use evolve with health conditions in similar ways as the statistical probability. While I find that expectations include private information, they do not account for all information available to the individual, especially the individual's demographic characteristics. / by Norma B. Coe. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-118). / by Sanghoon Ahn. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Giuseppe Bertola. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references. / In the first chapter of this thesis, I study Japanese municipal mergers using a political coalition formation model. Political coalition formation games can describe the formation and dissolution of nations, as well as the creation of coalition governments, the establishment of political parties, and other similar phenomena. These games have been studied from a theoretical perspective, but the models have not been used extensively in empirical work. This paper presents a method of estimating political coalition formation models with many-player coalitions, and then applies this method to the recent heisei municipal amalgamations in Japan to estimate structural coefficients that describe the behaviour of municipalities. The method enables counterfactual analysis, which in the Japanese case shows that the national government could increase welfare via a counter-intuitive policy involving transfers to richer municipalities conditional on their participation in a merger. In the second chapter, I examine selection effects in the cross-country state system. The countries present today are only part of a larger set of potential countries. Since many modern states originated as colonies, colonial data can be used to examine correlates of independence. During decolonization, larger and more economically successful colonies were more likely to become independent. This selection effect may explain why, despite commonly held opinions about efficiencies of scale, small countries appear to have higher GDP both in terms of growth and levels. The estimated selection model implies that analysing only currently independent countries can introduce substantial selection bias. / (cont.) An example of this is presented with the Frankel and Romer trade-instrument regression, where the selection effect biases the coefficient on the instrument upwards, and a regression on an unselected sample yields a negative and statistically insignificant coefficient. In the third chapter, I examine the endogeneity of linguistic fragmentation, assuming that national borders have already been fixed. Users of ethnic fragmentation indices generally assume that fragmentation is constant and exogenous. In many countries, however, linguistic fragmentation has decreased a great deal over the past two centuries, and frequently-used measures of ethnic fragmentation rely heavily on linguistic differences to distinguish ethnic groups. Previous qualitative research suggests that linguistic homogenization is correlated with administrative centralization. This hypothesis is tested empirically using the population of the largest city in each country in 1900 as a proxy for centralization, along with the population of the country as a whole and its surface area. Using these proxies produces a statistically significant relationship between centralization and linguistic homogenization. Furthermore, when these variables are included in regressions predicting economic growth the coefficient on fragmentation is halved and becomes statistically insignificant. Similar results are obtained when the relationship between fragmentation and corruption is examined. / by Eric Gordon Weese. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Luis Oscar Herrera. / Ph.D.