The primary research question is: What changes have occurred in the status of women faculty members in higher education in the United States from 1974 to 1995. Status is determined by evaluating differences by sex in: the number of faculty, the tenure status, the average salary, the average salary by faculty rank, the percent of faculty to percent of earned doctoral degrees, and the percent of faculty to percent of enrolled students in higher education. The period since the enactment of equality legislation in the 19705 in the United States provides a time frame for this research. The ongoing legislative changes that occurred coincide with an increase in the presence of women faculty in higher education. These legislative changes redefined the role of women in the general work place and specifically in higher education. This research used secondary data to evaluate the status of women faculty over this time period. The data were collected from many published and unpublished Department of Education documents and several unpublished Equal Employment Opportunity Commission documents. Other federal government resources were used to verify the consistency over time of these reported data observations. The data were analyzed by determining percentage changes, plotting the data, and using linear regression when appropriate to determine if over time (1974-1995) the status of women faculty members in the United States have improved. The compilation of the data in one source provides a research source for future researchers. The data analysis for the time period 1974-1995 resulted in these general conclusions. a) The percent of female faculty to total faculty increased 10.9 percent. b) Female faculty salary as a percent of all faculty salary was 86.23 percent in 1974 and 86.94 percent in 1995. Average salary compensation for female faculty as a percent of average compensation for all faculty members did not improve over this time period. c) The average salary for female faculty as a percent of average salary for all faculty members experienced a decrease or showed a minimal increase over the time period 1974-1995 at each of the following ranks: assistant professor (96.7 percent to 96.6 percent), associate professor (95.9 percent to 95.5 percent), and full professor (89.4 percent to 90.4 percent). The average salary for female faculty at the rank of instructor as a percent of average salary for all faculty members increased over this time period from 92.5 percent in 1974 to 98.7 percent in 1995. d) The percent of women faculty with tenure increased (41 percent to 51 percent), but the percent of male faculty with tenure increased more (58.2 percent to 71.8 percent) over the 22-year time period 1974 - 1995. e) The increase in the percent of female doctoral recipients (21.3 percent in 1974 to 38.8 percent in 1995) exceeded the increase in the percent of female faculty members (23.7 percent in 1974 to 34.6 percent in 1995) for each year after 1977. f) The percent of enrolled female students (45 percent in 1974 to 55.5 percent in 1995) continued to exceed the percent of female faculty members (23.7 percent in 1974 to 34.6 percent in 1995) for each year over this time period. The overall increase in the percent of female faculty members (10.9 percent) slightly exceeded the increase in the percent of enrolled female students (10.3 percent). Based on the criteria defined to determine if the status of women faculty have changed in the United States over the time period 1974 to 1995, this research conc|udes that moderate changes have occurred in the number of female faculty and the pool for female faculty. Overall female faculty as a group are paid less then male faculty. When compared to male faculty, fewer women proportionally have tenure, women are proportionally in lower rank positions, and fewer women with doctoral degrees proportionally are employed in faculty positions. Research to monitor the status of women faculty should be ongoing. Knowledge of sex-based inequities in education must be shared and publicized to make administrators, politicians, and women faculty conscious of these conditions.

This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2018 / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. "Some pages in the original document contain text that runs off the edge of the page"--Disclaimer Notice page. / Includes bibliographical references. / In this thesis, I use rich individual- and household-level data to explore the impact of different forms of financial innovation on development outcomes in Africa. Chapters 1 and 2 utilize data from a digital lender that provides credit over mobile phones. Chapter 1 presents novel evidence on the magnitude of consumer liquidity constraints and the relative importance of the various forms of asymmetric information that may contribute to them. I find that borrowers almost always take out the maximum credit line available to them, consistent with short-term liquidity constraints. I then use quasi-experimental variation in credit policies across individuals and time to estimate the relative magnitude of selection and incentive effects among new borrowers. I find that information asymmetries go a long way toward explaining high observed default rates. Chapter 2, my job market paper, explores the impact of dynamic incentive schemes on borrower behavior in the digital credit market. I use a series of quasi-experiments induced by policy nonlinearities to estimate the effect of progressive lending policies on borrower repayment decisions. I find that new borrowers who receive a larger initial loan are more likely to default on that loan. By contrast, repeat borrowers who receive a larger loan (relative to their previous loan) are actually less likely to default. I provide evidence that this reflects a strategic repayment motive, whereby borrowers repay in order to get access to larger loans in the future. Chapter 3, written with Yu Shi, uses household-level data from a panel survey in Nigeria to explore the relative importance of formal versus informal finance. We find that informal financial markets remain important and are quite effective in enabling consumption smoothing by lower-income households and businesses in Nigeria. / by Stacy Carlson. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak)"--Page 3. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three chapters that study how characteristics of peers and schools affect human capital. The first chapter reports estimates of academic and social peer effects from a large-scale field experiment at selective boarding schools in Peru. The experimental design overcomes some methodological challenges in the peer effects literature. I randomly varied the characteristics of neighbors in dormitories with two treatments: (a) less or more sociable peers (identified by their position in the school's friendship network before the intervention) and (b) lower- or higher-achieving peers (identified by admission test scores). While more sociable peers enhance the formation of social skills, higher-achieving peers do not improve academic achievement; in fact, they further reduce the academic performance of lower-achieving students. These results appear to be driven by students' self-confidence. / The second chapter studies whether students prefer friends who are similar to them and whether these preferences persist when students have to interact frequently. I use network surveys and exploit variation in the exact position of the students in the allocation to dormitories at selective boarding schools in Peru. Students are more likely to form social relations with peers who are of their same poverty status, academic level, and sociability. However, students who are neighbors in the allocation to dormitories are more likely to become friends, and this occurs regardless of their type. Furthermore, being exposed to peers of a different type also encourages more diverse friendships and study groups that go beyond the neighbors in the dormitories. The third chapter (co-authored with Joshua Angrist and Parag Pathak) evaluates mismatch in Chicago's selective public exam schools, which admit students using neighborhood-based diversity criteria as well as test scores. / Regression discontinuity estimates for applicants favored by affirmative action indeed show no gains in reading and substantial negative effects of exam school attendance on math scores. These results hold for more selective schools and for applicants most likely to benefit from affirmative-action, a pattern suggestive of mismatch. However, exam school effects in Chicago are explained by the high quality of schools attended by applicants who are not offered an exam school seat. Specifically, mismatch arises because exam school admission diverts many applicants from high-performing Noble Network charter schools, where they would have done well. / by Román Andrés Zárate. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 143-148). / Innovation is an important driver of economic growth, and public policy can affect many aspects of innovation. This thesis investigates the role of public policy in relation to two specific aspects of innovation: 1) who becomes an innovator and 2) where intellectual property is located once an innovation occurs. The first chapter analyzes how tax rates on patent- and trademark-related income affect where patents and trademarks are located internationally. I study how changes in patent and trademark tax rates in various countries altered the flow of patents and trademarks in and out of the countries. Using data on patent and trademark transfers from the US Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), combined with market-based patent value estimates, I estimate the sensitivity of IP location to the changes in tax rates. I present suggestive evidence of income shifting and tax base erosion by showing that patents and trademarks tend to locate in countries with lower tax rates. The second chapter (jointly written with Carolyn Stein and Heidi Williams) investigates the role of gender in the evaluation of patent applications submitted to the USPTO. We document that patent examiner gender appears to have no effect on the evaluation of patent applications submitted by female inventors relative to male inventors, suggesting male examiners are not differentially biased in their evaluation of patent applications from female inventors. The third chapter (jointly written with Yosub Jung) investigates how the passage of US state laws granting married women the rights to own separate property and own their earnings affected patenting by female inventors. In the 1800s, before such laws were passed, the notion of coverture meant that married women's property and earnings were controlled by their husbands. We compare patenting by women before and after the acts and show that patenting by women increased after these laws. / by Jane Jungeun Choi. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three chapters. I, first, study the long-run growth of finance. I construct comprehensive national financial balance sheets, financial accounts and production accounts for twelve advanced economies over the past two centuries using hundreds of historical sources. Financial asset-to-output ratios more than quintuple while the output share of finance industry more than quadruples. Despite this dramatic growth in the volume of finance, financial deepening is slow and the structure of finance is stable. Financial growth over the past two centuries is primarily driven by capital formation. These results shed new light on the recent dramatic expansion of financial assets, services, and debt, and directly link these secular trends to an ongoing debate on rising wealth-income ratios and inequality. The second chapter, joint with Johannes Hermle, studies the impact of a male breadwinner norm on gender inequality. / We develop a marriage market matching model featuring a male breadwinner norm - a discontinuity in husbands' marginal utility from spousal income. We predict that a norm should cause a concave kink in households' relative income distribution, a kinked increase in the divorce probability and a kinked increase in household good provision by females at the point where both spouses earn the same. We test these predictions using large administrative tax data from Germany. Consistent with the presence of a male breadwinner norm, we find a sharp kink in the relative income distribution at the 50% threshold as well as a crowd-out of couples with a female primary earner relative to random matching. The third chapter studies the evolution of financial systems in common and civil law countries since 1870. / I show that, In line with legal origins theory, civil law countries have always had significantly smaller capital markets, smaller financial sectors and more bank-reliant financial systems than common law countries. Convergence immediately prior to World War I can be explained by increased financial integration and free capital movement, while financial fragmentation and shocks to the capital stock during and after the war help explain the strong divergence afterwards. / by Nikolaus Hildebrand. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis studies three questions in economic development and political economy. Chapter 1 presents empirical evidence on the causal effect of close elections on political selection and performance in India. An extensive literature in political economy predicts electoral competition improves governance. Empirical work testing this theory is scarce, however, due in large part to the difficulty in identifying the causal impact of competition, which is itself an equilibrium outcome shaped by politician behavior. To address this identification challenge, this paper proposes a shift-share instrument that uses variation in aggregate party popularity over time ("shifts") and local party preferences across space ("initial shares") to predict the vote-margin gap in local elections. / Using data on Indian state constituency elections, I find political parties respond strategically to competition by selecting high quality (high valence) candidates to run for office, where quality is proxied by lower criminality, higher education, and higher wealth. Once in office, however, these politicians perform no better in facilitating economic growth or providing public goods. Instead, I find parties make temporary, and likely inefficient, reallocations in state-run resources such as electricity in the run up to competitive elections. Together, the results suggest that while the anticipation of close elections may lead politicians to take costly actions prior to an election, electoral competition does not necessarily result in improved economic outcomes. Chapter 2 studies how the spatial allocation of public goods within cities depends on politicians and bureaucrats. / In many cities around the world, the bureaucrats and politicians that comprise local governments manage non-overlapping administrative and political units. Using geo-referenced data on public goods, property characteristics, and residents in two major cities in Pakistan, I use a spatial regression discontinuity design to estimate discontinuities in public goods provision and property values across these boundaries. These discontinuities are used to construct measures of political and administrative unit "value-added," and to quantify the variation across each type of unit. I find that the delimitation of political and administrative boundaries results in large variation in public goods quality and self-reported property valuations within cities. Political unit quality is correlated with a number of politician and constituency observables, suggesting that political factors may be important determinants of internal city structure. Chapter 3, coauthored with Adnan Q. / Khan, Asim Khwaja, and Benjamin Olken, investigates whether strengthening the link between local taxation and urban services can revitalize the social compact between citizen and state. A significant challenge to the provision of local public services in developing economies is the inability to raise adequate resources, especially through local taxation. In many countries, the social compact, whereby citizens agree to pay taxes to fund their desired services, is broken. A low willingness to pay taxes leads to low revenue collection, and prevents adequate service provision, which in turn reduces willingness to pay and can even lead to citizen disengagement from the state. We investigate whether strengthening the link between local collections and urban services can increase citizen's willingness to pay for services, improve service delivery, and enhance local politics. / We test this in major urban centers in Punjab, Pakistan via several interventions - including eliciting citizen preferences for specific services when taxes are collected, earmarking revenue for specific services, and enabling local politicians - that credibly strengthen the link between tax collection and urban service provision. This paper presents the experimental design and reports first year impacts on tax payments. We find strengthening the link between taxes and services increases tax payments: taxpayers who failed to make a full payment prior to the interventions increase property tax payments after the interventions are introduced. / by Mahvish Ifrah Shaukat. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 169-181). / This thesis includes three papers. In the first paper, I use a close election regression discontinuity design to study the development effects of political alignment between local legislative constituency representatives and state governments in India. I assemble a comprehensive annual dataset on India at a fine geographic unit and find that aligned politicians have lesser growth of visible long-term investment goods, although aligned constituencies do not get less of some other variables. In the second paper, I study the consequences as well as determinants of formation of new districts and district headquarters in the Indian context. There is evidence of an increased growth (or reorganization) of economic activity around newly formed district headquarters. However, the evidence of an effect on the entire district is mixed. In the third paper, I find a negative relationship between size of political constituencies and the various variates pertaining to the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Guarantee Scheme in India. The results are consistent with a simple theory of maximization of electoral prospects by electorally motivated government where the citizens' total demand from the government is not significantly increasing in the size of the electorate. / by Sourav Sarkar. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics, 2019 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis consists of three chapters on households' consumption. In the first chapter we study the canonical consumption-savings income-fluctuations problem with incomplete markets and show theoretically how to recover households' preferences and beliefs from their consumption and savings decisions. The main innovation is to show how to use the transitory component of income as an instrument that shifts current consumption without changing beliefs about future stochastic changes in consumption. As such, the transitory component of income, affects consumption growth through an intertemporal smoothing motive with no immediate effect on precautionary savings. With the precautionary motive neutralized, comparing changes in consumption and savings in response to temporary shocks allows us to identify the curvature of marginal utility: when savings respond more than consumption to transitory changes in income, the relative prudence is higher. / Additionally, the transitory component makes it possible to identify an effective discount rate, which in turns makes it possible to control the degree of households' impatience. The curvature of marginal utility and the effective discount rate are sufficient to understand how preferences restrict consumption choices through the Euler equation. To then recover beliefs, we assume that beliefs are independent of exogenous changes in assets. This gives us an additional instrument to identify beliefs since the belief system then has to be consistent with the implied savings patterns as assets vary. These two instruments allows us to non parametrically recover preferences and beliefs in a very general framework: we can accommodate multiple consumption items (both durable and non-durable), multiple assets (liquid and illiquid, risky or not), habits, endogenous labor supply and so on. The second chapter builds on the first. / We investigate empirically, in data from the PSID and the SIPP, how households' expectations deviate from rationality. Our estimation shows that households are overconfident and overoptimistic. The main source of overconfidence is that households underestimate the frequency of shocks and their optimism is driven by an underappreciation of negative shocks. However, these biases are not homogeneous in the population: they are amplified for lower income households while higher income households' perceptions are closer to rational expectations. These results explain not only the quantitative magnitude of undersaving and overreaction to income shocks, but also why higher income households accumulate disproportionately more wealth. We then explore how these beliefs affect the design of unemployment insurance and the transmission of countercyclical income risk to aggregate demand. / In the third chapter, written with Xavier Jaravel, we investigate how to design optimal income redistribution policies when the price of goods is depends on the size of the corresponding markets and different households consume different goods. We introduce Increasing Returns to Scale (IRS) and heterogeneous spending patterns (non-homothetic preferences) into the canonical tax problem of Mirrlees. In this environment, any change in tax policy induces a change in labor supply, hence a change in market size, which translates endogenously into a change in productivity; this productivity response affects consumer prices and sets off another round of labor supply changes, market size changes, productivity changes, further labor supply changes, and so on. We show theoretically how to characterize these general equilibrium effects and we quantify their importance for the optimal tax schedule. / The calibrated model matches empirical evidence on IRS as well as the tax schedule, earnings distribution and spending patterns observed in the United States. We establish three main results: (1) the optimal average tax rate is substantially lower on average, falling from about 45% under Constant Return to Scale (CRS) to about 35% with IRS (because IRS increase the efficiency cost of taxation); (2) with IRS and homothetic utility, optimal marginal tax rates are much less progressive than under CRS, and they become regressive above the 65th percentile of the income distribution (because IRS increase the efficiency cost of taxation relatively more for the rich); (3) with IRS and non-homothetic utility, optimal marginal tax rates become more progressive (intuitively, the planner internalizes that the productivity increase that could result from a tax break to the rich has low social value if the rich spend their marginal dollar on products that the poor do not consume much of). / These findings indicate the importance of endogenous productivity and non-homotheticities for optimal taxation. / by Alan Olivi. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Economics

In this dissertation I examine the effects of sample selection on the probability of stroke among older adults. If study subjects are selected into the sample based on some non-experimental selection process, then statistical analysis may produce inconsistent estimates. Chapter 1 develops a model of non-ignorable selection for a discrete outcome variable, such as whether stroke occurred or not. I start by noticing that in the literature there are relatively few applications of the Heckman model to the case of a discrete outcome variable and they are limited to a bivariate case. After that I extend the Bayesian multivariate probit model of Chib and Greenberg (1998) broadly following the logic of Heckman's original (1979) work. The model in the first chapter of my dissertation is set in a way general enough to handle multiple selection and discrete-continuous outcome equations. The first extension of the multivariate probit model in Chib and Greenberg (1998) allows some of the outcomes to be missing. In particular, stroke occurrence is missing whenever the person is not selected into the sample. In terms of latent variable representation this implies that multivariate normal distribution is not truncated in the direction of missing outcome. I also use Cholesky factorization of the variance matrix to avoid the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm in the Gibbs sampler. Chapter 2 evaluates how severe the problem of sample selection is in Assets and HEAlth Dynamics among the Oldest Old (AHEAD) data set. I start with a more restrictive assumption of ignorable selection. In particular, I apply the propensity score method as in a recent paper by Wolinsky et al. (2009) and find no selection effects in the study of stroke. Then I consider the model developed in Chapter 1, which is based on a less restrictive assumption of non-ignorable selection, and also find no evidence of selection. Thus, the main substantive contribution of this chapter is the absence of selection effects based on either ignorable or non-ignorable sample selection model.

This thesis consists of two chapters. The first chapter investigates the causes of the recent slowdown in college attainment in the United States. The second chapter studies the gender wage gap by occupational complexity. For white males born in the United States after 1950, there is a stagnation in the fraction of high school graduates that go on to complete a four-year college degree. At the same time, across successive cohorts, those with a four year-college degree achieve increasingly higher lifetime earnings than those with a high school degree. What caused this phenomenon? I formulate a life-cycle model of human capital accumulation in college and on the job, where successive cohorts decide whether or not to acquire a college degree as well as the quality of their college education. Cohorts differ by the sequence of rental price per unit of human capital they face. My model reproduces the observed pattern in college attainment for the 1920 to 1970 birth cohorts. The stagnation in college attainment is due to the decrease in the growth rate of the rental price per unit of human capital commencing in the 1970s. My model also generates 79% of the increase in earnings for college graduates relative to those for high school graduates. Part of this increase is reinforced by a stronger association between college and ability. Female to male wages are U-shaped across occupations ordered by increasing complexity, where complexity is defined as the ratio of abstract to manual tasks content. The U-shape flattens over the lifecycle and across successive cohorts. I develop an occupational choice model with learning by doing on the job. Male and female individuals differ by their level of skill. Occupations differ by the skill required to perform and the marginal product of skill. The model reproduces the gender wage gap across occupations for cohorts born between 1915 and 1955 in the United States. The small work experience of females relative to that of males decreases female wages disproportionately across occupations and influences female occupational selection. I find that 69% of the lifecycle gender wage gap is attributable to work experience. Removing differences in work experience between genders results in a larger fraction of females choosing occupations for which the gender wage differential is smaller.